Walk onto almost any packaging line running cereal into boxes, soft drinks into bottles, or blister packs of medicine into cartons, and there’s a decent chance the brain of that machine is a grey-and-green box with words stencilled on the front: ELAU or PacDrive. 

Ask the engineer standing next to it what’s wrong, and they won’t say “the Schneider Electric PacDrive controller has faulted.” They’ll say “the ELAU’s down again.” 

That’s strange, when you think about it. Schneider Electric bought ELAU outright back in 2005. The company hasn’t existed as an independent business for two decades. And yet the name has stuck — on the factory floor, in fault logs, in the language engineers reach for at 3am when a line stops and nobody can figure out why. 

This article covers why that name never went away, what ELAU PacDrive actually is, and why understanding its history matters more right now than it has at any point since 1998.

Before PacDrive, machines ran on steel, not software 

To understand why PacDrive was such a big deal, it helps to picture what it replaced. 

Before the late 1990s, high-speed packaging machines were mechanical beasts. A single line shaft ran the length of the machine, and everything was mechanically geared and cammed off that one rotating spine. It worked but keeping the machine intact was a challenge. For example, changing a product format meant swapping cams and gears. If  one part of the machine gets worn out then it ripples through the whole system, making a maintenance a demanding discipline.  

This changed in 1998 when a German company called ELAU invented a new device: PacDrive where the first time, the PLC, the motion controller, and the machine’s communication all lived in a single processing unit, making machine maintenance easier to do and less struggling. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say PacDrive reset the standard for how packaging machines were built. Within a few years it was the reference architecture across CPG, food and beverage, and pharmaceutical packaging lines worldwide. 

How ELAU became Schneider Electric  

ELAU’s success didn’t go unnoticed. In 2004, Schneider Electric took a 46.5% stake in ELAU AG. A year later, in May 2005, Schneider acquired the remaining outstanding shares, making ELAU a wholly owned subsidiary. 

The change in ownership meant nothing for people overseeing these machines because the hardware kept doing what it had always done. The badge on the box might have shifted, eventually, but the muscle memory didn’t but engineers kept saying “ELAU,” because that’s what the technology was, regardless of who signed the pay cheques upstream. 

By 2010, Schneider introduced the next generation: PacDrive 3. It kept the DNA of the original ELAU technology but rebuilt the plumbing by swapping the older proprietary Sercos II hardware for Ethernet-based Sercos III communication and adding new servo drive options and an integrated safety architecture. In 2011, PacDrive 3 became one of the four pillars of Schneider’s MachineStruxure automation platform, and ELAU as a standalone identity was formally folded into Schneider Electric Automation GmbH. 

So there are, in effect, two generations of this technology quietly running side by side on factory floors today: the modern PacDrive 3, built on current Schneider hardware and the older PacDrive M, the original grey-and-green ELAU-branded controllers that plenty of plants never migrated away from, because the machines they run still work perfectly well. 

 The part nobody puts on a press release: PacDrive M is now obsolete

PacDrive M became obsolete in December 2018, with production on new parts was ceased and official support from the original equipment line is kept to a minimum. 

This is an issue because many over 55,000 machines worldwide continue to use the PacDrive M device, with plenty of that installed base sitting on the legacy hardware, live production lines in pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and packaging plants, running product every single shift. 

When a legacy ELAU controller does fault, two things are true at once: parts are hard to source, and the number of engineers who genuinely understand this specific, aging architecture is shrinking every year the technology gets older. The knowledge is walking out the door with the people who built their careers on it. 

And downtime on these lines isn’t cheap to sit through. The costs are high, 15 minutes of prevented downtime is enough to cover a year of proactive monitoring and the average unplanned incident today runs to 81 minutes, up sharply from 49 minutes not long ago, incurring a significant cost to the company. 

Why this history is the whole reason Machine Analyser exists? 

This is where the story stops being background reading and starts being relevant to what you do on Monday morning. 

Machine Analyser wasn’t built by a generic software company that decided industrial monitoring looked like a promising market. It was built by DMC, the only UK firm 100% dedicated to ELAU PacDrive, with over a decade of on-site breakdown support behind it. Everything in the history above, the naming confusion, the two hardware generations quietly coexisting, the obsolescence risk creeping up on legacy lines — isn’t abstract industry trivia to DMC’s engineers. It’s what they’ve been solving on factory floors for years, one breakdown at a time. 

That’s the gap Machine Analyser was built to close: know the fault, before it stops you. 

• PacDriveAssist turns a breakdown from a blind hunt into an instant diagnosis for engineers. The exact device, the exact fault, the exact fix, delivered the moment the line stops, built from the same deep ELAU PacDrive expertise this article has been describing. 

• PacDriveInsight takes the obsolescence problem head-on, flagging end-of-life ELAU components and supply risk before a missing part turns into extended downtime for your stores team. 

It connects directly to your existing PacDrive controllers, read-only, zero impact on machine performance, live in under a day. No rip-and-replace, no new sensors, no lengthy IT sign-off. Just visibility into a system that, until now, either ran on tribal knowledge or ran on hope. 

The name isn’t going away. Neither is the risk. 

Twenty years from now, there’s a good chance engineers will still be muttering “the ELAU’s down” at machines running on hardware that’s even older than it is today. That’s not a criticism of the technology, PacDrive earned its longevity by being genuinely well-built. But longevity without support is exactly the condition that turns a routine fault into a multi-hour production loss. 

Understanding where ELAU PacDrive came from is more than a history lesson. It’s the context for why condition monitoring on legacy PacDrive lines isn’t optional anymore — it’s the difference between a five-minute fix and an afternoon of guesswork. 

Still running legacy ELAU or PacDrive hardware on your lines? Book a demo and see what real-time diagnostic intelligence looks like on your own machines. Not sure what an hour of downtime is actually costing you? Run the numbers with our ROI calculator first. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

Is ELAU PacDrive still supported by Schneider Electric? 

Schneider Electric supports the current PacDrive 3 platform, but the original PacDrive M generation is officially obsolete, meaning new parts are no longer manufactured, and official support is minimal to non-existent depending on the component. Sites still running PacDrive M typically rely on third-party spares suppliers and specialist support providers like DilMotion Control. 

What’s the difference between PacDrive M and PacDrive 3? 

PacDrive M is the original ELAU-era architecture launched in 1998, using proprietary Sercos II communication. PacDrive 3, launched by Schneider in 2010, kept the same core logic-motion approach but moved to Ethernet-based Sercos III communication, added new servo drive options, and introduced an integrated safety architecture. 

Can I still get spare parts for a legacy ELAU controller? 

It’s getting harder. Because PacDrive M is obsolete, new-manufacture parts are no longer available, and the pool of engineers who know the platform is shrinking. Most sites now depend on refurbished/used part suppliers, obsolescence monitoring, or third-party support specialists to keep legacy lines running. 

Do I need to install new sensors to monitor an ELAU PacDrive line? 

No. Your PacDrive controller already tracks fault codes, drive health, and many other data points like I²T internally. Tools like Machine Analyser read this existing controller data directly and passively, rather than requiring new external sensors or hardware to be fitted to the machine. 

Is monitoring an ELAU PacDrive controller safe to do without affecting production? 

Yes, when the connection is read-only. A read-only connection extracts diagnostic data from the controller without writing to it, altering settings, or touching machine logic, meaning zero impact on cycle time, production stability, or machine performance. 

How quickly can a legacy PacDrive site get visibility into its machine health? 

Typically within a day. Because the approach reads existing controller data rather than requiring new hardware, calibration, or IT sign-off, deployment is fast compared to sensor-based retrofit projects.