Aside from the incessant drive to make packaging machinery more productive, we are beginning to see the conscious leveraging of automated packaging systems as a strategic business advantage. This is occurring on several fronts.

This paper presents a number of trends to watch for, underlying business and technical strategies, and the enabling technologies that are changing the game. These trends are based on the observations of a technology provider that has for over a decade specialized exclusively in automation packaging machinery. This paper also aggregates best practices that have visibility in the marketplace and/or have been reported by research analysts and the press. This paper is intended primarily for consumer packaged goods manufacturers, but is equally applicable to the life sciences. The perspective of this paper is global. For the sake of clarity, acronyms requiring special knowledge have been avoided. This paper is simply intended to offer practical initiatives that your management team can readily implement for your packaging operations to actively support your consumer marketing strategy, sustainability initiatives, supply chain strategy, and lean manufacturing programs.