FULL TRANSCRIPT: 

This year for Pack Expo, PAC Machinery is teaming up with two companies to showcase smart bagging with collaborative robotics at the Pack Expo show in Las Vegas, Nevada, September 29th – October 1^st. We’re talking to Jack Carberry, Account Manager with CMES Robotics, and Greg Johnson, Director of Sales for PAC Machinery. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us. How exciting to be showcasing a packaging collaboration that is really advancing what’s possible in automated packaging equipment. This one will feature PAC Machinery’s new roll bag R3200 Fulfillment Paper Bagger. Greg, why don’t you tell us about this auto bagger?

With the recent demand for sustainable packaging and sustainable bagging, especially in the fulfillment space, we redesigned and built the Rollbag R3200 Fulfillment Paper Bagger around the ability to do a couple things. One to quickly and efficiently pack orders in sustainable materials and also give companies the ability to choose different types of materials to fit their sustainable goals. It’s also again very simple to operate and set up can be set up in minutes. Offers companies various options that that you can quickly change between paper and plastic. We’ve designed the R3200 or redesigned it to work with our Fiberflex curbside recyclable paper material. On our poly side, we have materials that we manufacture that are up to 100% recycled content.

And this bagger will be integrated with CME’s robotics AI powered piece picking and packaging technology. Jack, introduce us to CMES and tell us about the technology that will be featured.

Yeah. So, we’re showcasing CMSE robotics AI vision to be able to locate identify, pick and place inside the auto bagger that PAC Machinery is providing with us. This is able to handle a wide variety of SKUs without needing any manual intervention. So, seamless direct to bag fulfillment and really PAC Machinery can collaborate with any robotics company.

Greg, tell us a little bit about the relationship that PAC Machinery has with CMES. So ever since the end of Covid, the fulfillment industry has been on a staggering increased pace and really are on the cutting edge of looking at the industry and staying ahead and CMES is one of those companies that’s really impressed with everything they’ve done and obviously with the influence of AI and the integration with AI it’s even more important to stay on that cutting edge. It made absolute sense to partner with them on these types of projects.

Yeah, one of the things that was brought up when we were kind of preparing for this was some of the challenges that the robotic system solves in today’s fulfillment operations. There are a few big challenges that both identified and the first one is labor has been pretty hard to come by and neither of us are really seeing this as a problem that has an end in sight anytime soon. So when positions aren’t being filled for already pretty low margin business, it’s very problematic. And one of the other things we noticed is this is a very repetitive uh job or work that’s being done and there’s not traditionally a lot of value ad that needs to happen during this process. Uh this makes it a very easy process to automate and one that typically has a very good ROI because it’s a one very repetitive and two robotics and AI can do it very efficiently. This is a very real-world application and yes it might be specific to 3PL’s or ecom but I think a lot of people as they walk through the show they’re going to get ideas like oh we could also use you know automation or AI here or maybe we can look at some other types of packaging machinery and areas that they originally didn’t think was possible.

So very exciting stuff. It’s one of the reasons why we’re excited about Vegas and this particular show and what we’re doing together. There’s a lot of exciting developments and new products and new things that we’re in development.

Check out our exhibit and talk to PAC Machinery and CMES about our innovations booth W2344.