PACKAGING W


hether it’s face cream in a Christmas gift pack or a personalised label on a bottle of soft drink, packaging lines must adapt to changing needs. Unifying control will be


key here, explains Simon. As packaging lines diversify, this places immense pressure on production machines. One week, lines are expected to handle large volumes, and niche product runs the next. Changeovers must happen in minutes rather than hours, with multiple products on one machine. Meanwhile, operators must select recipes for different formats and variants at the touch of a screen, rather than relying on time-consuming manual adjustments or complex engineering interventions.


“Brand awareness and loyalty is harder than ever to build with increasing market saturation, so new levels of personalisation and premiumisation possible with lot size one are seen as a key market differentiator.”


THE PROBLEM WITH FRAGMENTATION When you look at most packaging lines, these are often a patchwork of different control systems. Each machine, whether it’s the filter, capper, labeller or case packer, often comes from a different OEM with its own hardware, software and interface. Manufacturers are also increasingly moving away from single automation vendor models due to the supply chain risk as exposed recently, and the limitation of potential innovations. This means each of the machines may also feature a different PLC with a different software platform. For operators, this can be a challenging task.


Instead of running machines, much time is spent navigating multiple interfaces and diagnosing faults that are either mechanical or software driven. For maintenance teams, this fragmentation


can be just as frustrating. When multiple vendor technologies are installed on the same line, they must quickly learn the quirks of each and manage different upgrade cycles to ensure long-term asset support without any disruptions to production. As for automation engineers, things are no


simpler. They must understand and support software from multiple automation vendors and OEMs with different software environments and programming styles. It’s a common misconception that the


automation platform denotes the programming language. This is not the case. All vendors


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UNIFYING CONTROL IN PACKAGING LINES


By Simon Hall, Global Market Technical Sales for Food, Beverage & CPG, Beckhoff Automation


The packaging industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Consumer expectations are shifting from mass-produced uniformity to personalisation, seasonal customisation and premium experiences, and this is forcing businesses to innovate


support all IEC 61131-3 languages, meaning any of the graphical languages (LD, FBD, SFC) and textual languages (ST, IL) can be used on any platform. The choice of programming language(s) is


left to the OEM, allowing the machine’s logic to be implemented entirely in graphical ladder logic, structured text, or a combination of both. This potential variation clearly provides a challenge for engineers to understand and maintain multiple systems.


THE CASE FOR UNIFICATION Believe it or not, unification isn’t about choosing a single control vendor. It’s about standardising interfaces and data so that packaging equipment from different suppliers can work together seamlessly on the same line.


DECEMBER 2025/JANUARY 2026 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS In practice, this often means adopting


vendor-agnostic standards and communication methods. For example, Packaging Machine Language (PackML) is a standardised architecture that defines common states, modes and PackTags for packaging machines. This enables consistent control, easier integration and simpler maintenance on automated lines. Similarly, the Weihenstephan Standards (WS)


provide universal naming conventions for PLC variables. They can also help engineers rapidly gather data from machines because standard data points, such as power consumption, are consistently named and typed across systems. They are uniform, regardless of whether they are from different machine buildings or use different automation technologies.


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