250 Pacesetters sold world-wide

Intelligent Machine Control Inc., the US based manufacturer of the Pacesetter computer set-up system, has recently sold its 250th Pacesetter. Brent Woolston, President of IMC says "During the past 10 years over 250 Pacesetters have been sold and installed in 23 different countries world-wide. The Pacesetter has become the de-facto standard" offered by many machinery suppliers around the world. It is also the set-up computer system of choice to replace an obsolete set-up control system, or for machines that have never had a set-up computer on them before.

We now have Pacesetters controlling almost every type of Corrugated converting machine on the market, from Martin, Langston, Emba, United and Ward to TCY and even older Simon and S&S machines.

Its international appeal stems from its open architecture design - it is essentially an industrial version of the standard IBM compatible PCs found in most offices. All components used are commercially available. This means that the Pacesetter system can be easily upgraded and never becomes obsolete, unlike most other set-up controls on the market that use PLCs and other proprietary electronics that become outdated and insupportable after several years. The software is very flexible and easily adapted to new types of machines. The user interface also supports any language. At present 9 languages are supported, including right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and character based languages such as Chinese."

Brent Woolston sees an excellent future ahead "Due to the need for shorter set-up times on converting machines, plants are increasing seeing the importance of computer set-up controls. We know the retrofitting and replacement of older obsolete set-up controls is a growing market. We also already work with several OEMs to design set-up controls for their new machines. Many OEMs are now down-sizing and subcontracting non-core functions. As we are very specialised and experienced with converting machine set-up controls, we will continue to work with more OEMs to design cost effective and customised set-up controls for their converting machines."