Case Study: Tronrud Engineering Packaging Machine (Industry Example)

A widely-cited industry example (originally publicized around Tronrud Engineering's Hannover Messe 2019 unveiling of their high-speed TCP PN12 packaging machine) is one of the few named, quantified commercial case studies for MCD-based virtual commissioning in machine building.

The machine and the numbers

Tronrud Engineering, a Norwegian packaging-machine builder, used a digital-twin workflow combining NX Mechatronics Concept Designer, Simatic S7-PLCSIM Advanced, and TIA Portal to develop a packaging machine capable of packing 300 flow-wrap bags per minute into boxes. Reported results:

• The machine was designed in 10% less time than the company's usual process.
• The commissioning phase was reduced by roughly 20–25%.

Erik Hjertaas, general manager of packaging technology at Tronrud Engineering, was quoted characterizing the shift as fundamentally about how disciplines work together, not just a tooling swap — describing the digital twin as having become "a natural part of our everyday work" rather than a one-off project exercise.

Sources: aggregated from search-indexed coverage; see also https://www.blue-automation.de/en/software/mechatronics-concept-designer-mcd and Siemens virtual-commissioning materials at https://www.industry-mobile-support.siemens-info.com/en/article/detail/109963864

Why this matters for expectations-setting

The commissioning-time reduction figure here (20–25%) is notably more conservative than the broader industry marketing claim of "50–70% commissioning time reduction" that appears in some Siemens-adjacent promotional material (see version-and-industry-context.md in this collection for that figure and its source). Treat the higher-end marketing figures as best-case/aggregate claims across many customers, and figures like Tronrud's named, attributed 20–25% as a more realistic single-project data point for a real machine builder doing this for the first time on a genuinely fast (300 bags/minute) machine.

Related: robot commissioning collision-avoidance example

A separate, commonly-repeated example in MCD marketing/practitioner material describes early detection of a robot commissioning error via a digital twin that prevented a collision during initial start-up — i.e., a kinematic/reachability error that would have caused a real robot to crash into its cell was caught in the MCD simulation first. This example recurs across multiple secondary sources (Blue Automation's practitioner page among them) without a single traceable primary case-study document, so it should be treated as a commonly-cited illustrative anecdote in the MCD user/partner community rather than a citable, sourced case study with named company and numbers.