Wrapping product means major money

“Reaching consumers is much harder than it used to be and that’s an opportunity for the packaging industry, because 70% of buying decisions are made in the store while looking at the product.”
Harris DeLoach, chief executive of Sonoco Products delivered the keynote speech Monday at Pack Expo International in Chicago relaying this insight and others.
“It used to be that companies advertised on three TV networks and in a couple of magazines. Now there’s cable TV and the Internet. Now, shapes, sizes, and eye-catching graphics are ever more important,” DeLoach said.
“Customers want ready-to-eat, smaller portions, convenience and time oriented packaging of foods. They want safety, security, tamper-free, reduced and recyclable packaging of food and products. Consumers want sustainability,” he said.
That’s why packaging is dynamic. It has to change with time as does anything that wants to stay with the times and remain relevant.
On the Expo floor at the McCormick Center, there were four overriding themes: RFID (radio frequency identification), robotics, flexible packaging, and brand security.
The first two appeal primarily to the manufacturer by lowering production costs and the latter two pleasing the consumer, making them feel safe and secure in their purchase.
The show organizer is the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute. Attendance will probably exceed 50,000 and the show occupies 1.2 million square feet of floor space.
There are several co-located events including the CPP (converting/packaging printing) Expo, PROCESS EXPO, and the Conference at PACK EXPO.
-- Nicholas Sheble

Rockwell signs licensing deal with OSIsoft

Rockwell Automation today inked a licensing deal with OSIsoft to package the software provider’s technology within FactoryTalk suite of products, said Kevin Roach, vice president of software at Rockwell at the company’s Automation Fair in Baltimore.
The pact, utilizing OSIsoft’s PI System, will have a two-pronged affect. OSIsoft’s historian will touch users on the factory floor at the device level, but will also go up through the enterprise and will connect at the plant level.
“The alliance significantly accelerates the depth and breadth of our historian-based offerings,” Roach said. “(Manufacturers) can continue using the current historian, but the new historian will offer new capabilities.”
Historians today connect to PCs so they must remain scalable up through the enterprise and back on down, Roach said.
“This partnership realizes our long-term vision of extending the scope of the PI System through a relationship that takes full advantage of its capabilities and brings our technology platform to new markets,” said Pat Kennedy, chief executive at OSIsoft. “There’s a whole class of users that don’t get exposure to data that they do at the plant level,” Kennedy said.
The OSIsoft technology collects control system data and provides data analysis and automated reporting capabilities. The technology identifies and helps reduce process variability and should lower costs by reducing manual operations.

Is there a leader at the helm?

Technology is the vehicle for the future, but people will continue to be behind the wheel in the driver’s seat.
But today more than ever, a company has to have the right people in leadership positions, said Lee Cockerell, the retired executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resort, Operations during Wednesday’s keynote address at the MESA Second Annual Plant to Enterprise Conference in Orlando, Fla.
What does Disney have to do with manufacturing? When it comes to leadership, it relates very well. Cockerell said the same principals hold true with any company. One of the base line ideas is to have the leaders of the company to continually stress the basics. “Teach people the basics. Don’t get bored with the basics. By continuously stressing the basic principals of the company, then you get more employee commitment,” he said. “Keep stressing a culture based on basics.”
One of the key ideas for leaders is to be sincere and to listen and react to workers.
“Never underestimate the importance you have on other people’s lives. People don’t care about you, they care about your position,” he said. “People will not commit to you until you commit to them.”
“You need total commitment from employees; you have to treat them properly. If you do that, they won’t run away,” Cockerell said.
If you want to improve your business, he said, then you have to focus on the people. He added there are four areas a company needs to achieve success.
Leadership has to come first, then the leaders create an environment for employee excellence, then comes customer satisfaction and if all that goes well, then you will get the business results.
It also doesn’t matter if you have three people reporting to you or 100, you have to set the proper tone for workers to achieve to goal.
“Even if your company is a mess, and you have five people reporting to you, it is up to you to create an environment allowing them to achieve the goals,” he said.
An interesting fact, Cockerell said, is workers often don’t know what the true goal of the company really is. “You have to make employees know what their purpose is,” he said.
People talk about leadership, but let’s face it, leaders are few and far between. Talk to me.

Finding the right measurement

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure and you can’t measure what you can’t see” is an old industry axiom, but at the end of the day, manufacturers’ profitability, and future, depends on how well they measure financial and operational performance.
It all comes down to finding the proper metrics to measure and then execute and plants should become more efficient. Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International and Industry Directions Inc. released Tuesday at MESA’s Second Annual Plant to Enterprise Conference in Orlando, Fla. the results of a study entitled “Metrics that Matter,” which shows manufacturers using technology to share key performance information between operations and finance have an advantage over those who don’t. The study also shows a small number of manufacturers that responded said they have those effective links for measuring performance.
Part of finding the correct metrics is about collaboration throughout the enterprise.
“The collaboration issue is not going away so the quicker people get their arms the better off they will be,” said Julie Fraser, principal at Industry Directions. “There is a disconnect between operations and finance,” Fraser said, “and most manufacturers can’t afford to be in that position today.”
The study shows manufacturers that improved the most have metrics linking operations to finance, and the metrics also speed up data collection and feedback to the operation, and they also utilize plant software. The study also found the top two manufacturing applications planned for investment in the next 12 months are plant dashboards and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Some of the survey highlights are:
• One in three respondents plan to buy plant dashboards in the next 12 months, and 29% plan to buy MES, making them the top investments planned for the year, out of 18 software technologies in the survey.
• Respondents using MES are over twice as likely to have improved over 1% annually on average in the past three years in upside production flexibility, energy cost per unit of production and market share.
• Respondents using plant dashboards are over twice as likely to have improved significantly in cash-to-cash cycle times and total inventory on hand.
• More respondents achieved ROI in under two years on broad functionality software – ERP, MES and EAM – than other applications.
MESA will make two documents available to members on its web site (www.mesa.org). The first is the “Metrics that Matter: Uncovering KPIs that Justify Plant Improvements” document gives the findings of an on-line and telephone survey of 135 manufacturers, surveyed this summer. “Metrics that Matter Guidebook & Framework” describes how to develop a sound system of performance metrics and provides guidance for managers and teams developing performance metrics and IT systems to track and display performance.

Does management allow growth?

It’s very simple, if a company wants to grow, they have to have a senior management totally committed to the concept of growth.
While that may seem like an obvious and simple concept, a huge chunk of companies out there have no idea of how to grasp the idea of growth, said Michael Treacy, co-founder of GEN3 Partners and author of the book, “Double-Digit Growth during Tuesday’s keynote address at the MESA Second Annual Plant to Enterprise Conference in Orlando.
“If you want to grow, stop shrinking,” he said. “Growth is a discipline.
People talk about the challenges their companies face in today’s marketplace where they feel the market is limited in size, or competition is incredibly fierce. Treacy doesn’t agree. “The challenge isn’t with the marketplace. The challenge is with management.” He cited examples of companies growing a double-digit growth from 1997 to now such as Starbucks, Johnson Controls and Osh Kosh Trucks, among dozens of others.
He said double-digit growth doesn’t have to come with companies in hot, high tech areas. One example was Johnson Controls. They make thermostats and auto interiors. They had a management team, Treacy said, disciplined for growth.
He said Osh Kosh Trucks is another interesting example. They were plugging along at single digit growth patterns then all of a sudden in 1997, they took off and started growing at 20% a year. He didn’t understand why would a maker of heavy duty vehicles like fire trucks just take off on this huge growth pattern. After doing some research, he found out. They just hired a chief executive that had worked at Johnson Controls.
“Growth is all about people,” he said.
Growth strategy focuses on five sources of revenue growth, base retention, share gain, market position, adjacent markets, and new lines of business, he said. Growth, Treacy said, is not an accident. The bigger you get, the more you have to build the capacity to grow, which means you have to have a plan and be ready to act upon it. You have to build the management discipline to grow, he said.
Treacy said the difference between growth companies and “other” companies is growth companies have a performance culture, while others have a “good enough” culture. Another difference is growth companies have a talent rich environment, while others don’t regularly think about talent.
“Growth is a management thing,” he said. “To improve growth, you have to engage the whole management team. Growth demands a management discipline – just like cost control.”
Is your management poised for growth? Talk to me.

ISA wireless standard sees support, success

Automation industry power Emerson Process Management reaffirmed its support of the ISA-100 standard this week at its annual users-group conference in Nashville, Tenn.
“We want to move this standard forward, not so that we get a bigger piece of the wireless pie,” said Emerson-Rosemount’s Chief Steve Sonnenberg, “but so that there is a bigger pie.”
Emerson supports the ISA and HART standards.
The ISA-100 standard is for industrial wireless networking in a broad set of industries, which addresses the complete architecture from plant-floor sensor to the chairperson’s boardroom.
Twenty-four companies, including Emerson, presented their technical proposals in September at ISA’s headquarters in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Eighteen of those companies have aligned themselves on certain commonalities, and Emerson is one of them.
The elements the group settled on are an 802.15.4 physical layer; a channel hopping, time-synchronized, self-organizing mesh protocol; and industry standard security architecture.
The expectation is ISA-100 will arrive mid-2008.
The HART standard focuses on process automation and seeks to protect the installed-base investment that exists in millions of instruments. HART is technology in which Emerson and Rosemount have great financial and historical interest. The HART Communication Foundation will review and validate any proposed standard.
Emerson is collaborating with suppliers in the development of this standard, and the company hopes to have a draft ready in February 2007.
—Nicholas Sheble

Predictive intelligence is where it’s at

British Petroleum (BP) sees the vast majority of the opportunities to leverage wireless technology to be in the retrofitting of existing facilities.
David Lafferty, chief technology officer at BP, had concerns years ago when BP allowed Emerson to run field trials at its Cherry Point, Wash., facility. “I could see the looks on the faces of the Emerson engineers when I showed them what I wanted monitored and where,” he said Monday at the Emerson Global Users Exchange in Nashville, Tenn. “They had some real doubts about pulling the job off, too.”
From that day of attempting to monitor the heat output of a motor bearing in a fan at that BP plant, which was in a hazardous, filthy location, wireless has come a long way.
Now Emerson figures its wireless technology will address not only the needs and the future of a legacy-instrumented plant, but will serve in state-of-the-art, brand new plants.
The company punctuated its confidence in wireless by introducing a $15,000 “wireless starter kit” on Monday. It wants to get “the everyman” and “everyplant” involved in the technology and figures that buy-in can’t be much less expensive than this.
The package—Wireless SmartPack Starter Kit—has five wireless instruments that form a mesh network, AMS software, and a gateway to network with the existing DCS or bus technology. Emerson will also send an engineer to install the kit if the user so needs.
“This is enough to cover a single process unit, like a cracker, and the payback will be in a matter of weeks,” said Bob Karschnia, director of technology for the Rosemount Measurement Division.
—Nicholas Sheble

Emerson: All roads point toward wireless

An instrument engineer in the 1970s worked with pneumatic gears, progressed to analog tools, and digital ones also. Then he graduated to fieldbus technologies like Foundation and HART, and on to OPC.
The next step and maybe the biggest opportunity yet is upon us now and it is wireless sensing and networking.
So said John Berra, president of Emerson Process Management this morning to the 2,000 users, business partners, and Emerson technologists gathered in Nashville for their annual information exchange conference.
“The technical obstacles to wireless communication in plants and factories are falling. No wires means no limits to what we can see and hear in the plant. We can put in more monitoring points and at 1/10 the cost of wired sensors,” Berra said.
“This will open new doors in the areas of predictive maintenance and asset management,” Berra said. “We’ll save money in factories not because we’re saving by not using copper wire, but because we can, for example, monitor corrosion better or keep closer track on valve health and its affect on process efficiency.”
At a press conference this afternoon the company will announce a number of new wireless products as well as a “starter kit” for companies only thinking about or just beginning their use of the technology.
Berra also released the latest fiscal numbers for the process management division he heads. Sales are up 15% for the year over year to the tune of $650 mil pushing total revenues to $4.8 billion.
“We expect to push past $5 billion next year,” he said.
-- Nicholas Sheble