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Flexible Packaging Lines Change Dozens of Times a Day.
Is Proficy Keeping Up?

Flexible packaging plants run more SKUs, more substrates, and more changeovers than almost any other process environment. Proficy should be capturing all of it — downtime, waste, yield, and changeover time — in real time. If it isn’t, you’re making decisions with stale data.

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150+
Proficy implementations
in packaging environments
25+
Years of Proficy
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Why Flexible Packaging Manufacturers Struggle to Reduce Changeover Time

These aren’t generic manufacturing challenges. They’re specific to the way flexible packaging lines run — and the way most Proficy installations fail to capture them.

01 — MOST COMMON
Changeover Time Nobody Can Measure
Flexo and lamination lines change over constantly — substrate, ink, tension. If Proficy isn’t configured to tag changeover events, that time disappears into “unplanned downtime.”
02
Waste Coded as “Startup Loss”
Register waste, splice failures, and tension breaks during startup show up as one generic bucket. You can’t improve what you can’t distinguish.
03
OEE That Doesn’t Reflect Reality
When Proficy OEE isn’t scoped to the actual bottleneck — often not the press itself, but lamination or slitting — the number is technically correct but operationally useless.
04
Substrate & Ink Data Living in Spreadsheets
Operators track substrate roll data and ink consumption on paper or in Excel. That context never makes it back to Proficy, so there’s no correlation between material lots and yield events.
05
No Visibility Across Multiple Plants
Multi-site flexible packaging operations often have siloed Proficy instances. Line managers can’t benchmark across facilities or route jobs based on available capacity.
06
Regulatory Traceability Gaps
When a food brand customer requests a production record for a specific lot, the data trail through lamination, printing, and slitting should be automatic. For most plants, it isn’t.
The Changeover Visibility Gap

Where Does Your Line Time Actually Go?

Most Proficy installs track running time and hard stoppages. The value — and the losses — live in the transitions. Here’s what a properly configured system captures that yours probably doesn’t.

STEP 01
Last Good Product
Timestamp from encoder — Proficy captures this automatically
STEP 02
Substrate & Ink Changeover
⚠ Typically invisible — needs custom event configuration
STEP 03
Tension & Registration Setup
⚠ Often coded as “slow running” — masks the real time
STEP 04
First Good Product
Quality confirmation — captured if quality event is configured
STEP 05
OEE Impact Calculated
Changeover time properly allocated — so you can actually improve it

Rain Engineering’s Proficy configuration engagements specifically audit Steps 2 and 3 — the gaps that destroy OEE accuracy in flexible packaging environments.

Customer Story
Flexible Packaging · OEE · Changeover Reduction

A 23-Point OEE Jump
Started With Naming the Loss

A mid-size flexible packaging converter running 6 flexographic lines had spent two years trying to improve OEE. The number wasn’t moving. The problem wasn’t their equipment — it was that Proficy was grouping changeover time, splice losses, and tension faults into a single “unplanned downtime” bucket. You can’t attack a bucket.

+23pts
OEE improvement across all 6 lines — 12 months post-implementation
41%
Reduction in average changeover time after visibility was established
$1.4M
Annualized capacity value recovered without new capital investment
The Challenge
6 flexo lines, 8–12 changeovers per shift, zero visibility into where the changeover time was actually going. The plant manager knew OEE was poor. Proficy said so. But the report just said “downtime.” It couldn’t tell you if the problem was the operator, the substrate, the ink system, or the doctor blade. Every improvement idea was a guess.
What Rain Engineering Did
Week 1–2: Proficy event taxonomy audit — mapped all downtime codes against actual machine states. Week 3–4: Custom changeover event model built for each line type, capturing 7 distinct changeover sub-phases. Week 5–6: OEE dashboards rebuilt around the actual bottleneck (line 4 lamination station, not the press). Live data within 6 weeks of project start.
Read the Full Case Study Download PDF
How Rain Engineering Helps

Proficy, Configured for the Way Flexible Packaging Manufacturing Actually Runs

We don’t drop in a standard Proficy template. We configure the system around your actual production model — your substrates, your changeover sequence, your downtime taxonomy.

Changeover Event Modeling
We build a custom Proficy event model that maps your changeover sub-phases — substrate roll change, ink flush, registration setup, tension calibration, first-good confirmation — as discrete, measurable events.
Proficy Plant Applications
OEE Scoped to Your Actual Bottleneck
In most flexible packaging plants, the constraint isn’t the press — it’s downstream lamination or slitting. We configure OEE reporting to track the true constraint and stop misleading you with press-only numbers.
Proficy OEE
Substrate & Material Lot Traceability
Link substrate roll IDs, ink lot numbers, and adhesive batches to production records in Proficy Historian. When a customer audit comes, the answer is in the system — not in a spreadsheet.
Proficy Historian
Cross-Site Benchmarking Dashboards
For multi-plant converters, we build Proficy dashboards that aggregate OEE, changeover time, and waste across facilities — so operations leadership can see the full picture and route jobs intelligently.
Proficy Operations Hub
Operator Training Built for Your Floor
We don’t hand off documentation and leave. Rain Engineering trains your operators and shift supervisors to use Proficy the way it was configured — so the system actually gets used after go-live.
Education Services

We’d been running Proficy for four years and didn’t know our changeovers were taking twice as long as they should. Rain Engineering showed us where the time was going in the first week. That data paid for the entire project before the engagement was over.

Director of Manufacturing Operations
Mid-size flexible packaging converter · 6 flex lines

More Stories from Flexible Packaging Manufacturers

All Customer Stories

  • How MES Actually Works on the Plant Floor in Different Industries

    Plant managers live in two worlds… One world is the dashboard that shows a neat, rounded OEE score. The other world is the shop floor, where operators wrestle with micro stops, stubborn changeovers, and reactive maintenance.

    Read Story

  • Admiral Packaging Customer Story

    A MES integration partner is not simply a generic IT vendor but a specialist services firm that designs, connects, and supports your chosen MES platform, such as the Velotic Proficy MES suite, across both the shop floor and enterprise layers.

    Read Story
Related Rain Engineering Services
Proficy Implementation OEE Configuration & Tuning Proficy Historian Setup Operator Education 24/7 Support Plans Proficy System Audit

Ready to See What Your Proficy System
Is Actually Telling You?

Rain Engineering’s free Proficy Assessment takes 60 minutes. You’ll leave with a clear picture of what’s working, what’s misconfigured, and what it’s costing you every shift.

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