Robopac, one of the top brands of Aetna Group, is a world leader in packaging, specializing in end-of-line solutions. Robopac has a great vision for the future. Therefore, when Robopac and Siemens join forces, the result is realized in terms of innovation, efficiency and savings, with the focus turned to the development of the circular economy. 

In the last quarter of 2022, a new project has come to life that aims to optimize and automate the process of making the PLC program of manufactured machines. Robopac produces more than 500 machines per year that generally require manual intervention of software designers to make the PLC program and hardware configuration.

That process is done by manually selecting the PLC code and adding the devices on the specific machine with the correct product identification code into the hardware configuration.   

Specifically, for example, using TIA Portal Openness, the user configuring the machine has the ability, not knowing the TIA environment, to select from the graphical interface the various machine components. Through this selection, the project is automatically populated in TIA Portal, both from a hardware and software perspective, all transparently for the user. 

Robopac thus began using Siemens' TIA Openness with the goal of simplifying the software's life by avoiding the need to manually choose software blocks within TIA for each machine peculiarity, thus reducing the possibility of errors. But the project's goals do not stop there. 

When having understood the potential of the tool,  a second step in which not only the construction of the machine software will be automated, but all the hardware components within the project will be automatically populated in TIA Portal, passing always and only through a graphical configuration interface and not from the TIA Portal environment.

Headquartered in Castel San Pietro Terme (Bologna), Robopac operates according to a philosophy of internationalization that reflects the Aetna Group's global vision: thanks to its numerous offices and production centers around the world, it acts in a capillary manner to create high-performance tailor-made solutions. Inherent in its DNA, there is an extreme attention to the issues of the circular economy: it is in this direction that the company's commitment to digitization and process automation go, indispensable to address the needs of the packaging world in an increasingly green-oriented key.