“30% of the orders we received last month required the use of degradable packaging boxes, and traditional equipment simply cannot adapt to materials of different thicknesses.” Nora, production supervisor of the Thai food factory, pointed to the stagnant assembly line in the workshop and shook her head. Until the introduction of ply-pack’s modular intelligent packaging system, her team replaced the pressure sensing unit and sealing mold in just two hours. When the production line was restarted, the robotic arm had accurately grabbed the new corn fiber packaging box.
This “plug and play” modular design is becoming a key technology for the packaging machine industry to cope with order fragmentation. Unlike traditional models with fixed structures, ply-pack disassembles the equipment into independent functional modules such as material identification, molding processing, and data monitoring. Enterprises can freely combine them according to production needs - processing corrugated boxes today and switching to bio-based film bags tomorrow, without the need to modify the entire machine.
"We can even debug parameters remotely." Nora showed the control interface on her mobile phone. Last week, Chinese engineers helped her optimize the crease algorithm for special-shaped gift boxes through the cloud system. This in-depth operation and maintenance support saves Southeast Asian customers from cross-border travel costs and increases equipment utilization by 40%.
Under the pressure of the environmental protection wave, the material compatibility advantage of modular systems has become increasingly prominent. When the EU forced the use of 30% recycled plastics for exported goods, ply-pack customized a wear-resistant cutting module for German customers to make its old models compatible with recycled materials. In Japan, a system with a humidity sensing module successfully solved the problem of brittle cracking of seaweed packaging bags during sealing.
"The essence of flexible production is to make machines adapt to people, not people adapt to machines." In Nora's workshop, workers are using magnetic suction interfaces to replace packaging specification identifiers, as simple as installing new accessories for mobile phones. As the setting sun shines through the factory glass onto the silver-gray module components, the assembly line has switched to night shift production mode, and the packaging materials for the next batch of orders will be automatically matched through system updates before six o'clock tomorrow morning.
