This Whisper Report investigates how will robotics in packaging reshape enterprise ops? It explores how flexibility, efficiency, and human–machine collaboration are quietly redefining operations on modern packaging floors, based on firsthand industry perspectives from the field. Cited experts: Mike DeGrace, Universal Robots; Mike Wolf, Signode; Rich Parkhurst, KUKA; Mike Renzetti, Robotunits Inc.; Brett Olson, SICK Sensor Intelligence; Brand Winer, Cognex.
This Whisper Report investigates the biggest packaging tech blind spot for CIOs. It draws on urgent insights gathered from Pack Expo Vegas 2025, where operations engineers and technology professionals shared firsthand perspectives. From overlooked IT involvement to cultural gaps with OT teams, the findings expose critical challenges in data use and collaboration. Discover why these blind spots persist—and what steps can transform them into competitive advantages. Featuring insights from Mike DeGrace (Universal Robots), Rich Parkhurst (KUKA), Aaron Silverberg (Flexible Vision), Chris King (Unitronics), Mike Wolf (Signode), and Brandon Winer (Cognex).
We took the most frequently asked and most urgent technology questions straight to the operation engineers and technology professionals gathering at Pack Expo Vegas 2025. This Whisper Report addresses the question regarding what’s the biggest packaging tech blind spot for CIOs? Figure 1 displays.
The first blind spot to overcome is that there is an actual project underway. As Universal Robots’ Mike DeGrace shared, “This blind spot in involving your IT data team early on in your projects. This is something that we encounter and that we always coach our customers to work on is to bring your IT data team in very very quick for the project especially if you’re looking at implementing autonomous mobile robots as the requirement for that team is going to be heavy and it needs to be they need to be involved very quickly.” If the formal methods are not keeping you in the loop, be sure to nurture and create those informal relationships across IT – information technology and OT – Operations Technology or the engineers operating the packaging space.
While IT and OT are both engineers, they operate in vastly different cultures. As KUKA’s Rich Parkhurst highlights, “The knowledge of what’s happening on the manufacturing floor or the needs of what’s happening on the manufacturing floor versus what happens in the business world. Right? Obviously things are time critical on the manufacturing floor. there are certain technical requirements that are needed to execute operations on a on a on a factory floor whereas those don’t exist in the business world and typically the people that are in the IT space are not knowledgeable or aware of that and so that communications between those two groups tends to be an issue.” More specifically, downtime is frequently measured in significant financial consequences in OT even for as little as an hour. Try attributing financial consequences to email being down for an hour – or any IT system for that matter. While many are upset when IT systems go down, the financial consequences tend to be of a different magnitude. Thus many in OT find those in IT cannot grasp their operating environment.
Many in IT want to be helpful to the business but do not understand the impact they can have on the business. One such critical function was highlighted by Flexible Vision’s Aaron Silverberg. “A lot of companies struggle with traceability and understanding what types of defects that they’re seeing on their line.” In case you were wondering how – its all in the data. That raises the question what data do you need and how does one get the data? Aaron went on to further explain that you can hire someone to get it for you. “We help our customers collect that data, be able to see if there’s damage on packaging, missing labels, upside down labels, anything that you can visually see through a camera’s lens will help detect that.”
Unitronics’ Chris King brings good news to those that were trying to figure out how to understand what is going on in the packaging area of the facility. In case you are not familiar your blind spot is, “the machines they already have. The data that’s already there, the data they’re already producing by the machines they have. If you can find a way to gather that, bring it to one central location, analyze it, report out of it, you’re going to have a lot more valuable information in your hands than you than you do today.”
Signode’s Mike Wolf is on the same page. “How much data is already available on the existing equipment that you can use to make business process decisions. So, when we talk about trying to figure out how to better manage an industrial facility, a lot of times the focus is on adding sensors or trying to figure out how do I add a whole solution. But one thing that you find if you work directly with the manufacturers of the equipment, a lot of that data is already on the PLC (programmable logic controller). It’s already on the screen. And our approach to doing IoT involves bringing that data straight into the cloud. So you can see the same thing on the factory floor and in the cloud when you’re doing fleet management.” For those not familiar PLC stands for programmable logic controller, it is the hardware controller that automates the machinery frequently found in OT spaces.
Many PLC’s have their data collected by the SCADA system. SCADA stands for supervisory control and data acquisition and they are quite popular in OT spaces. Cognex’s Brandon Winer suggests, “Thinking about like the bigger picture of the traceability side of things, the SCADA systems (supervisory control and data acquisition). Yeah, you want to collect all this data and you want all this data on your packaging line, but where does that go? And that’s usually the first step you need to start with.”
In other words, while it is valuable to respect you don’t want to disrupt OT, don’t assume that OT will not work with you and share their detailed data with you. If you are going through a OT and IT digital transformation, be sure to leverage TBW Advisors LLC’s first-hand extensive experience in this space. Inquiries should be scheduled at the projects onset and through the transformation including critical steps such as the strategy, architecture, and major benchmarks.
