MACS describes itself as a fast-growing company of committed people with more than 20 years of experience and passion.
With a team of experts coming from major companies from within Bologna’s ‘Packaging Valley’, it can offer a broad range of skills and experience covering virtually all types of packaging applications, including support for after sales maintenance services and spares for machines supplied by FIMA and ILAPAK.
The company offers an extensive portfolio of machines across three packaging formats. MACS Rigid, as the name suggests, comprises machines for the packaging of rigid products, including individual chocolates & chocolate bars, soap, biscuits & wafers and tobacco products. Its MACS Flexible range offers a variety of filling technologies for both solid and liquid products into a wide assortment of pouches, doypacks and sachets. Finally, it’s MACS Fill range, comprises highly customizable rotary and linear fillers for the filling of tubs, jars, pots and bottles.
Flexibility and agility
With such a broad range of technologies, MACS can cover multiple applications, but each individual machine must be flexible in its own right, as its customers need machine agility to adapt to market trends and product variations.
According to Francesco Marchioni, CEO at MACS: “We need to optimize our solutions across three key metrics: availability, running speed/output and the quality of product. Much of our success in this regard is down to our deployment of automation and control solutions from Rockwell Automation. High reliability results in much better availability, which leads to less downtime, all of which ultimately equates to higher efficiency and higher product volumes.
Reduced time to market
“By deploying new-generation servo technology, our customers gain much greater flexibility, which reduces time to market and changeover time between batches. We often supply turnkey lines, comprising three, four or even five machines all connected together, and when these are all seamlessly talking to each other on a shared, common platform using a single HMI, our customers gain maximum productivity.
“The digital backbone is also essential. Machines for our larger customers slot easily into existing digital architectures, while those for our smaller customers often create a starting point or hub for their own digital transformation. In all cases, the operational data our customers can collect and analyze is essential for modern production operations.
“We are also seeing a huge drive for sustainability across all the industries we serve. This is primarily addressed by the deployment of paper-based packaging. One of the major issues is that mono materials and eco materials are much more difficult to automate due to the physics and properties of the materials. But we have been able to adapt our core technologies and machines to cater for these demands, with flexible automation solutions playing a central role in these adaptations.
Speed & accuracy
“The advanced control solutions we deploy also make life much easier for operators. Using servo technology, we have been able to replace what were previously manual operations with automated procedures. Not only does this address skill levels and reduced machine familiarity, but automated systems tend to be faster and far less prone to mistakes.
“I have a great team of people here, all focused on developing new ideas and solving customer issues. Technically speaking I am the CEO, but I still enjoy getting involved in design and development, it’s where I came from. And with modern control solutions we know that we can call upon so much more flexibility, not just for us at the design stage, but for our customers too while in operation. Greater connectivity also means we can dial into our machines to support our customers remotely; and knowing that the Rockwell Automation platform is based around best-practice cybersecurity, gives us and our customers far greater peace of mind.”
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