The Business Area Digital focuses on digitization. With InspectifAI we have developed a software solution that works independently of the pharmaceutical testing machine in question. Artificial intelligence increases the accuracy of visual inspections and improves results. This results in greater safety for patients and saves valuable pharmaceutical products that would be incorrectly rejected by conventional vision technologies.

The Business Area Pharma is one of the leading international systems suppliers for the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. In May 2022, Körber was presented with the prestigious Pharmapack Sustainability Initiative Award at the trade fair Pharmapack 2022. The innovative packaging made of grass paper impressed the judges, thanks to its sustainability, quality, and safety.

Grass paper offers companies in the pharmaceutical industry an interesting alternative to packaging made from recycled paper and cardboard. Grass paper for folding boxes replaces up to 40 percent of the fibers with grass fibers. This has clear advantages:

• Production requires significantly less water and energy, avoiding up to 95 percent of CO₂e emissions.
• The almost unlimited regional availability of grass shortens transport distances.
• Grass-paper packaging is 100 percent compostable because it does not contain any chemical additives. The renewable resource grass has significantly shorter growth cycles than wood.

Rising energy prices are driving up the costs of logistics and production. Our Competence Center Manufacturing Logistics in the Business Area Supply Chain offers energy-intensive companies solutions for reducing energy consumption. Innovative product solutions enable precise counterweights to compensate for the inertia of the lifting belt and the compression unit. This allows the use of smaller motors in the hoist and the recovery of energy during downward movement. The medium version of the PA15 layer palletizer consumes 1.2 kilowatts per operating hour, which is up to 85 percent less energy than comparable market solutions.

Another focus is on the resource conservation of the product life cycle: We pay attention to sustainability from the selection of raw materials to the manufacturing process and assembly at the regional site. The modular design allows easy adjustments to production output, product content, product weight, and new circumstances.

In the Business Area Technologies our employees are also continuously looking for new applications, and sustainability plays an important role in this. Here’s an example: The Straw Maker produces paper drinking straws that require 50 percent less adhesive than comparable production lines. This reduces costs and the environmental impact. Körber applies knowledge gained over many years from the production and automation processes of filter-producing machines and is constantly refining this know-how further. It’s our contribution to creating a world with fewer plastic straws.

In the Business Area Tissue, we have developed an innovative technology for which a patent application has been filed. The Warm-up Contactless system heats the embossing rolls from the outside, increasing the strength and thus the volume of the end product, while maintaining the quality in terms of tensile strength, softness, and absorbency. This technology enables the production of high-volume rolls with less paper and fewer fibers, offering a more sustainable and economical alternative to conventional processing methods. The existing hot embossing systems in the tissue industry are more complex to install, more expensive to maintain, and more capital intensive, especially for existing machines, as the embossing rolls need to be replaced. Körber has developed the world’s first system to use electromagnetic induction for embossing. Thanks to electromagnetic induction, our non-contact heating system — for which a patent application has been filed — heats the embossing rolls from the outside without requiring physical contact with the rolls themselves. The plug-and-play Warm Up Contactless solution reduces energy requirements by up to 60 percent. At the same time, it extends the life cycle of the machines.