Whether it’s turntable, blister or carton packaging machines, feeding and handling systems or control and inspection solutions – KOCH Pac-Systeme has been facing up to its responsibility for the environment with sustainable packaging solutions for more than 30 years. Examples include plastic-free packaging, recyclable single-material packaging, and the cycleForm^® paper-based packaging, which won the German Packaging Award in 2021. And as if that isn’t enough, technological innovations that consume less material or enable machine resources to be used even more efficiently are also offered.

The developers at KOCH Pac-Systeme highly appreciate our know-how in IIoT implementation and deliberately draw on our expertise. This saves development efforts and costs, shortens the smartpacks’ time-to-market, and at the same time guarantees that KOCH Pac-Systeme is on the right technology track. After all, no one can evaluate the operating and status information provided by a gearbox better and more effectively than the manufacturer itself.

The product analyzes a drive train’s energy consumption, changing speeds or even any vibrations and noises that occur. This information is judged to be “OK” or “Not OK”. Together with the operating and status data of components at other machine points, e.g. vacuum generator flow sensors, they are aggregated, processed and displayed centrally in the machine’s brain – a dedicated IPC with state-of-the-art operating panel including connection to the Azure cloud system with the IoT Hub service; right through to specific instructions for the operating personnel. 

In the case of gearboxes with cynapse^® feature, this is done without any changes to the mechanical design, because the sensor technology, logic and IO-Link module is fully integrated into the respective gearbox, e.g. a TP⁺ 050 on a stamping axis or a DP⁺ 010 on a delta robot. What’s more, the module is standardized for all WITTENSTEIN alpha gearboxes and can therefore always be integrated machine-wide as standard. This also applies to the IT connection via IO-Link communication system, which is being used in more and more machine infrastructures due to its simplicity and openness. This even makes it easy to retrofit existing machines.

And that can be expensive. Depending on the machine cycle rate, the value of the product to be packaged, a possible product loss in case of process downtime and the resulting cleaning and maintenance work, the investment in the Predictive Pack has already paid for itself with just one avoided machine downtime. The operator can therefore actively optimize machine performance with the Predictive Pack and be supported externally by KOCH Pac-Systeme, if required. This option is becoming increasingly popular because it increases overall plant effectiveness.

For KOCH Pac-Systeme, implementing the Predictive Pack with WITTENSTEIN alpha has been an unmitigated success and made gearboxes with cynapse^® the future machine-wide standard. And the parent company, the Uhlmann Group, has also become aware of gearboxes with cynapse^® feature and smart services from WITTENSTEIN, and has ordered an initial test system. Parallel to this, KOCH Pac-Systeme and WITTENSTEIN are already working on new features for the Predictive Pack, for example anomaly detection that identifies unusual operating and process behavior at an early stage. This will then make it possible to detect errors before they occur and proactively avoid machine downtime. The potential opened up by gearboxes with cynapse^® and smart services from WITTENSTEIN is therefore far from exhausted.