A Case For Data-Driven Smart Packaging Equipment

By: Scott Behnke
Industry Growth Leader: Packaging

Industry 4.0. IIoT. OEE. Smart Factory. Lean manufacturing. Send it to the cloud!

Industry buzzwords abound in today’s manufacturing world. Every industry article or white paper is littered with them (this one included!). Staying up to date with the latest industry terms is almost as difficult as keeping up with the latest dance trending on TikTok. While learning how to move and jam to a song about bourbon steaks and cookie shakes might be fun, that trend will be replaced by something else tomorrow (or it already has been, as far as I know). The trends we are seeing in the packaging industry have, and will continue to have, more staying power than that.

All the buzzwords you hear point to a single concept: let the information you can gather from your equipment help you make better decisions about your manufacturing processes. This is the point of the Smart Factory, which is here to stay. It has moved past the trend stage to become a necessary part of today’s manufacturing environment. The question isn’t if you move to more intelligence on your factory floor, it’s when and how you leverage the technology into a more efficient manufacturing process, higher throughput, and less equipment downtime. Fortunately, industry has also moved past the trial and error stage of the Smart Factory and has several best practices in place to help manufacturers quickly integrate this technology.

IO-Link® has proven to be a critical component in the search for data from the factory floor. IO-Link enabled devices provide a wealth of accessibility to information about their status, device configuration, and health. That data can be used for machine control, preventative maintenance, overall equipment efficiency (OEE), and can streamline machine changeover. Data like throughput, level, distance, and temperature can be communicated from sensing devices without the need to add costly analog cards to your PLC. Smart sensors and devices with complex configurations can now be plug-and-play to decrease equipment downtime in case they fail. In addition, devices can also give health diagnostics. Things like sensors can let you know when dust buildup on the lens reaches a point where it needs to be cleaned off, decreasing the number of maintenance calls to the machine. All this data can be communicated very simply via Ethernet or any number of industrial networks to easily integrate with your existing machine architecture.

Once your data is collected from all those devices, the next challenge is “How do I access it and what do I do with it?” While spreadsheets and databases can do a great job of organizing and storing data, ultimately it's just numbers and cells unless you can access and act on it. Another component of the Smart Factory is visualizing that data with a graphical dashboard and creating reports that give you the status of your entire facility at a glance. For those who oversee multiple facilities, accessing that same information remotely can help you assist your entire operations team in working together more efficiently. Sending your data to a cloud data service with the ability to create those dashboards and reports doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task; technology is available that gets you looking at real-time data within minutes, not days or weeks.

Banner Engineering’s Snap Signal® products have been created to help you quickly start monitoring your factory data in a snap! Snap Signal products will help you connect equipment across your entire factory, not just new equipment. It is an overlay network that can convert any existing machine signals into a common industry communication protocol. This means your legacy equipment can be easily connected without disrupting its control platform, even if there is no existing network on the machine. At the heart of the Snap Signal system is the DXMR90 industrial controller, an enabling device that can transmit information from multiple sources simultaneously. This includes legacy devices connected via Banner’s S15C signal converters. If you are looking to leverage all benefits of IO-Link devices on your equipment, Banner has you covered there, too, with a full line of IO-Link masters, hubs, smart sensors, and indicator lights. Finally, you can use Banner’s CDS (Cloud Data Services) to access all your data and help visualize it so you can start making decisions quickly about optimizing your manufacturing process.

Think big! Start small! Scale fast! That’s the battle cry for using Banner’s Snap Signal products to help you convert your factory into a Smart Factory.