Why Bosch Packaging Technology Chooses Rockwell Automation

Manufacturing industry, where the making of goods rely on human hands or machines, had its origin in the New Stone Age, with the large application of methods for grinding corn, baking clay, spinning and weaving textiles, among others. Items utilized in manufacturing may be raw materials or component parts of a larger product and it usually happens on a large-scale production line of machinery and skilled labor. However, to function as a business, the manufacturer needs to consider costs, meet demands and make a product to supply the market.

The Company Background

Bosch Packaging is a global leader in providing packaging solutions in the food and pharmaceutical segment. Bosch Packaging, Goa, India – the Bosch Packaging Technology division – supplies horizontal form fill and seal machines primarily to the bakery and confectionery industries, and plans to gratify the omnipresent and ever-growing demands from the Indian packaging market through Bosch Packaging's Goa facility with its fully equipped R&D facility, engineering, and after-sale support, and sophisticated assembly shop floor to build machines with advanced technology.

Challenges: Bosch Packaging, India Required to Design a Product Distribution System (PDS)

Along with its wide range of products and global expertise, Bosch Packaging, Goa, India serves customers' demands by offering complete line solutions, customized machinery, and equipment, including Product feeding systems, Flow wrapper Lines, Collating machinery.

Often, for their customized line solutions, Bosch Packaging Goa, India is required to design a Product Distribution System (PDS) to feed product into down-stream wrapper lines. The time required to engineer these systems is a significant factor impacting project delivery schedules. The biggest challenge is to have a common engineered solution that can be re-used for various similar projects.

The challenges imposed due to the variability of customized project demands include:

•   Variation in line speed

•   Variation in the total number of downstream flow wraps

•   Variation in each of flow wrap speed and dynamics of flow wrap

•   Protection of IP while automation applied to PDS solution

From similar requirements in the past, addressed by their previous automation solution company, Bosch Packaging, Goa, India found that while the engineering time spent for each project was huge, maintaining consistency in the application code over various projects was also a challenge, and thereby impacted maintainability.

Another area of concern was the high installation time. This drawback occurred due to the limitation of handling data over a higher number of nodes (drives) which existed in the MODBUS communication network.

Solution: Bosch Packaging, India Finds Rockwell Automation 

For one of their customized line solutions, Bosch Packaging, Goa, India worked with Rockwell Automation to deliver the automation system. Application experts (GOTC) from Rockwell Automation carried out detailed discussions and in-depth analyses with the aid of the efficient engineering team of Bosch Packaging.

This yielded irrefutably positive results – it divulged the challenges faced in developing a PDS and led to a broad definition of a system that Bosch Packaging, Goa, India wished to achieve:

KPIs of control system for PDS; Encapsulating application code in a template; Ensuring IP protection of application code by using different levels of protection in Studio 5000 Logix Designer®; Adopting a strong communication network (Ethernet/IP) to leverage the advantages and lay the foundation for the future – Ethernet/IP is an industry-standard and a popular choice across industries.

To accomplish the defined objectives, Rockwell Automation proposed a solution based on:

•   CompactLogix™ L3 controllers

•   PowerFlex® 525 AC Drives, with an embedded Ethernet/IP port and Safe Torque-Off

•   POINT I/O™ family of Distributed IOs

•   Stratix® Ethernet switches

The Outcome

Rockwell Automation application engineers worked with the Bosch Packaging Goa, India engineering team to deliver a solution which helped address the challenges. After leveraging Rockwell Automation solution, Bosch Packaging, Goa, India reduced its engineering time by 50% on average to deliver similar projects, apart from greatly simplifying their architecture.