How Automation and Digitalization Are Transforming the Modern Corrugated Box Plant

During FESPA 2026, Bobst's David Arnaud makes the case on why both automation and digitalization are necessary for success in the modern corrugated packaging business.

The year 2026 has thus far been defined by a few key pressure points in the corrugated vertical. During his session, “Automation in the Modern Corrugated Box Plant and the Importance of Digitalisation,” at FESPA 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, David Arnaud, product marketing director for FFG-DRO at Bobst, discussed what he observes as the four main pressure points.

The session focused on how automation is evolving in the industry in order to meet these pressures as well as deliver measurable results. And while automation is essential, Arnaud noted that on its own, it is not enough due to its limitations in adapting to changing conditions and remembering optimal settings.

Adapting to Pressure Through Automation

Arnaud opened the session by immediately identifying what he feels are the four main pressures in corrugated in 2026:

• Market saturation.
• Demand mutation.
• Margin pressure.
• Workforce turnover.

Today’s converter doesn’t look the same as it did previously. “Today … you see the diversity that the converter can produce concerning the printing, the diecutting, the folding, different brands, different end-users,” he said. “This diversity is bringing a lot of complexity to manage [for] the converter.”

He added that what might kick off a Monday can drastically change by Friday, and that no two businesses are alike, leading converters asking how they can accommodate to these pressures. Arnaud pointed out at this moment that automation is an essential tool to help, listing three main reasons.

The first is the benefit around the physical strength, he said. Automation allows for the ability to handle a lot of the physical work that may be harder on an operator. “Today, we increase the possibilities with a robotic solution, new possibilities that we did not have in the past that allows [us] to increase this level of automation,” he said.

The second benefit automation brings is managing the output with fewer manual interventions and faster setups. Arnaud noted that today’s automation capabilities enable operators to manage two jobs at one time.

The final benefit he discussed during the session is accuracy. “Automation brings the ability of the machine to set all the axes very accurately, repeatedly [for] every run,” he said.

How Automation and Digitalization Go Hand-in-Hand

Automation might be essential, but, according to Arnaud, it isn’t the only tool needed to be successful in today’s corrugated market. “The real challenge is not the speed anymore, it's the complexity of the projectors,” he said, noting three different boundaries it has.

“Automation cannot see what's changing,” Arnaud said. For example, it cannot predict whether the quality of a substrate is changing, or a customer orders a different pattern than previously used for a job.

He also noted that automation on its own cannot remember any previous settings or what worked properly before. “Automation cannot remember the right setting from the old operator,” he said as an example. “You remember the one at the night shift. This one has the right recipe, but the machine doesn't remember what works properly.”

Arnaud also listed the inability to anticipate. For him, the way to address these limitations is through digitalization. “While automation executes, digitalization reveals,” he said. He added that “digitalization arrives with three main features”:

• It reveals what’s changing.
• It captures what works.
• It signals what’s coming.

Building on those three features, Arnaud also presented what he and Bobst see as the three main pillars of digitalization and how they are incorporated into its equipment.

“The first is around the centralized integration, the ability to prepare a job in one place,” he said. “This is a feature that we have on the machines for the operators — the job is completely changing. We used to [tell the] operator what to do, when to do it, how to do it. Today, we ask them to check the process, and just act if something is going wrong, unexpected.”

He also called attention to the tools that allow operators to anticipate any problems coming as well as the third pillar, which is all about quality inspection.

He wrapped up by returning to the main point of his session: “Automation without digitalization is just a fast machine. Digitalization without automation, it's just a nice dashboard … together, they multiply each other.”