Indian packaging machine manufacturing is at the right phase when it comes to adaptive manufacturing, according to officials from B&R Automation.
Adaptive manufacturing is about developing machines that can adapt to different products and packaging requirements. This is essential in today’s world of mass customization, eCommerce, direct-to-consumer, and omnichannel strategies.
Dinesh Mungi, Branch head, B&R Automation for Pune region, says that India is a huge and diverse country with a variety of packaging machine manufacturers. He says there are so many products of so many sizes on the shelf and brand owners change their products with increasing frequency. In such a scenario, adaptive manufacturing is the way to go.
“Conventional automation cannot match the cost ratio in such a situation,” he says.
Wlady Martino, Global Industry Segment manager, Packaging – B&R Automation, says that adaptive manufacturing is all about solving the challenges of the consumers.
“Today’s consumers expect to get the products they want, when they want them, personalized to their individual tastes and preferences. To meet this challenge, progressive machine builders are delivering machinery that adapts to the products being made and packaged, rather than forcing products to conform to a rigidly sequential process. That means proving to the demand of smaller batches, catering to the shorter life cycle of the product, and be competitive,” Martino discusses.
Mungi says that not only are large Indian machine builders open to adaptive manufacturing but even middle-level manufacturing firms are eager to incorporate this concept.
Indian packaging machine makers are getting sophisticated
Both Mungi and Martino say that the Indian packaging machine manufacturers are moving up the value chain and they are adopting greater automation.
Mungi says machine builders are making faster machines and are moving towards more automation. He says they are seeing more and more servo-driven machines in the market. And those machine manufacturers who are already building servo-driven machines are moving to pneumatics.
This is a positive development for the Indian packaging machine manufacturing industry. Adaptive manufacturing will help Indian machine builders to meet the demands of the global market and to compete more effectively.
