Manufacturing logistics and procurement – September 2022

04 October 2022

Trends in digitalising and automating the packaging industry
McKinsey has published a report highlighting the development, possible uses and industry effects of advanced technologies. The report interprets fourteen of the most significant technology trends unfolding today. You can download the report after registering.
Made Smarter has published the results of a survey (90 KB) about the need for UK manufacturers to digitalise to survive, recover and grow. SME manufacturers across all sectors are being urged to accelerate technology adoption to adjust to the economic challenges around the supply chain, energy costs, post-Brexit and COVID.

Deep Learning approaches for packaging equipment monitoring
University of Padova has published a paper (873 kB) entitled ‘A multi-label continual learning framework to scale deep learning approaches for packaging equipment monitoring’. Continual Learning aims to learn from a stream of tasks, being able to remember at the same time both new and old tasks. While many approaches have been proposed for single-class classification, multi-label classification in the continual scenario remains a challenging problem. The framework the researchers created was validated on a real-world multi-label Alarm Forecasting problem from the packaging industry.

Predictive maintenance application for packaging machines
For his thesis (7.53 MB) at the University of South-Eastern Norway Nils-Olav Skele studied the development of a predictive maintenance application for packaging machines. The application aims to monitor and detect early signs of wear and tear of the cylinders based on the life expectancy provided by the supplier and to perform regular maintenance on the servo motors, based on the running hours recorded by the frequency drivers for the packaging machines.

ISTA pharmaceutical shipping Guideline
The ISTA Pharma Committee has released their latest technical paper "ISTA PCG-03 | Thermal Shipping System: Performance Qualification (PQ) and Performance Verification (PV) Best Practice Guideline." The committee's goal was to determine the various qualification/verification approaches medicinal product companies are following to implement and maintain compliant temperature-controlled shipping processes and to develop a guideline to drive standardisation of best practices across the industry. You can download the paper after filling in your details.

Tracking software for pallets and containers
Load carriers such as pallets, crates or tanks are indispensable for transporting all kinds of products, but hardly ever get into the spotlights themselves. Fraunhofer researchers have developed software to track and make visible the paths of the load carriers. This gives the logistics sector enormous opportunities for improving the efficiency.

Adoption barriers for sustainable packaging practices
Lund University has published a paper (1.76 MB) in the Journal of Cleaner Production entitled ‘Adoption barriers for sustainable packaging practices: A comparative study of food supply chains in South Africa and Sweden’. The research formulates ten propositions that structure adoption barriers for sustainable packaging practices in food supply chains and explain the reasons for their occurrence. The propositions can form a basis for researchers to understand why the adoption of sustainable packaging practices in food supply chains may be lacking.
 

NVC members receive this information with all the relevant links in the monthly NVC Members-only Update. If you have any questions, please contact us: info@nvc.nl, +31-(0)182-512411