Global Companies Collaborate on the Future of Packaging

Tetra Pak is working with a variety of partners to change how business is conducted in this industry and help reduce energy use and emissions.

Tetra Pak
Tetra Pak

By David Greenfield, Director of Content/Editor-in-Chief, Automation World

 

Industry 4.0 and the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have long been major stories from a technology development point of view and through increasing numbers of application examples at specific companies. At Hannover Messe this year, a new kind of development seemed to be on the rise—multi-company collaborations formed to bring these new connected-industry visions to life.

We’ve been seeing news of such multi-organization collaborations a lot more recently, a good example of which is the OPC UA with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) down to the field level initiative. At Hannover Messe 2019, there was the announcement of an Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, which is designed to overcome the issue of difficult-to-connect proprietary automation communication systems. The goal of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is to use existing standards, such as I/O Link, OPC UA and RAMI (the architecture behind Industry 4.0) to connect every step from manufacturing to services. Current members include Balluff, Beckhoff, Endress+Hauser, Hilscher, ifm, Kuka, Pepperl+Fuchs and SAP, among others.

 

Another multi-company collaboration on display at Hannover Messe 2019 involved Tetra Pak, ABB, Ericsson, Microsoft, SAP, XMReality, BillerudKorsnas and Stora Enso in a partnership designed to connect the entire process from manufacturing and packaging to supply chain and recycling, according to Mattias Johansson, Tetra Pak’s Industry 4.0 integration director. He noted that Tetra Pak plans to consolidate all of these steps for its customers and provide one interface to it all.