PMMI president Chuck Yuska was among several futurists at the 2006 Packaging Strategies conference addressing global competition. He explained how PMMI members will “shed their machine-centric image to become total solution providers” operating in a “collaborative environment between materials, machinery, component and service suppliers….Innovation isn’t linear any more, it’s collaborative.”

This approach will address the environment that Energizer’s global package development manager Becchi Oesterle described as allowing only 3 to 6 months before consumer product designs are copied.

Yuska asserted that packaging machinery builders must become “automation and management systems developers. In the future, the cost of the machinery will be in the software, not the metal.”

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