The annual ARC Automation Forum isn’t supposed to be about packaging. But with automation at the very heart of improving packaging performance, this has become an increasingly important event for packagers to attend.

And the big news at this year’s forum, in so many words, was the emergence of international standards finally replacing counterproductive, restrictive control specifications at packaging machinery users. Automation users spoke of their requirements for interoperability, asking control suppliers not to lock them into end-to-end solutions precluding them from choosing best-of-breed solutions.

Enabling technologies applied by users and packaging machinery builders included IEC 61131 compliant modular programming techniques, ISA 88 principles and standardized networks. Also at ARC, the inclusion of the OMAC, Make2Pack and WBF users groups under the ISA organizational umbrella signalled the maturity and growing integration of their respective guidelines and standards.

To order a free upcoming ARC report on the topic of how control specifications are changing, click here.