November 8, 2017

Background: Heidelberg – Pushing the future of Packaging

Heidelberg is the leading supplier to the packaging sector. It’s breadth of products and services embraces the entire sector from independent carton producers with a stand-alone press, to being able to meet the industrial scale, business-focused needs of the largest global packaging groups.
This means supplying the workflows to process jobs as fast and as accurately as possible. Pushing finished printed sheets through cutting and creasing into a folder gluer with no waste of time. Offering litho presses that are as close to fully automated as possible. Delivering digital presses that use the same formats as litho presses and that therefore fit existing production workflows and equipment. And finally, it means enabling their customers to maximize margins in new business growth areas, produce at the lowest cost per sheet wherever possible, and all with zero defects

Peak Performance for packaging printers
Introducing the Peak Performance Speedmaster XL 106 in 2004 accelerated Heidelberg’s position in packaging significantly. The big breakthrough came in 2008, with the launch of the VLF formats using the same advanced XL engineering as on its B2 and B1 machines. At a stroke the major packaging groups needed to take a very serious look at what Heidelberg could offer. And they have followed up with orders for some of the most sophisticated printing machines ever built. Heidelberg’s heritage in packaging was initiated by the launch of its first true carton press, the Speedmaster CD 102, over 20 years ago. Transferring XL technology to the 102 platform on the one hand as well as the VLF launch has propelled Heidelberg to the leading position in supplying litho presses across the entire spectrum of packaging printers around the world.

Postpress at its best
It has since struck a deal with Masterwork to produce die cutters and folder gluers to the requirements of Heidelberg’s customers. As Masterwork is the leading manufacturer of foiling and die cutters in China with a dominant share of the demanding tobacco packaging market in that huge country, its quality is not in question. And in a high speed inspection system that Heidelberg sells as Diana Eye, it has the most complete system for visually checking the quality of a carton blank either as a standalone unit or as a part of the Diana carton gluer line.

This aligns perfectly with the needs of brands for absolute integrity of the package that reaches the shelf and with the growing need to turn jobs faster and in smaller quantities. There is a rapid inflation in the number of SKUs brands and retailers deal with, frequently changing packaging designs to maximize shelf impact. And because the shelf life of a supermarket product is shorter than ever, speed to market is essential, as is attention to cost and quality.

Smart Print Shop with Prinect workflow
Heidelberg’s business intelligence platform Prinect delivers the digitized infrastructure to utilize everything from the initial customer engagement process to providing real time data. This ensures transparency across everything from brand consistency through industry leading color management tools to performance reporting dashboards in Smart BI for all aspects of the organization.

Prinect general manager Anthony Thirlby is in charge of this aspect for Heidelberg. “Zero Defect Packaging has to be about upstream as much as about downstream operations,” he says. It is about creating a process that is repeatable for consistency, which links to the customer’s ERP systems to accept orders into the printer’s workflow automatically, and which returns data into their business management system, their customers, and to Heidelberg. This is the promise of Industry 4.0. 

For Heidelberg this data means being able to predict when maintenance is necessary and so schedule down time to replace parts to minimize disruption. Heidelberg will also benchmark the performance of equipment and to identify areas for improvement. This comes as the Performance Plus package, a program to fill any training gaps, eliminate bad habits and increase the productivity of the presses and other processes. 

Maximize productivity and minimize waste
The peak performance of a carton press, says Rainer Wolf, VP Product Management Sheetfed, is 83 million good B1 sheets on the floor over a full year period. While this is exceptional, there are 180 Heidelberg press installations clocking up more than 40 million sheets year over year.

“The number of sheets on the floor is consistently higher than other presses, regardless of format,” he says. This level of productivity leads to the lowest cost per sheet versus any of the competition. Functions like Intellistart 2, Inpress Control, Analyze Point and Inspection Control 2 combine to maximize productivity and minimize waste. At drupa Heidelberg introduced Hycolor MultiDrive: simultaneous washing of cylinders and ink rollers halves the wash up time when switching between colors as carton printers often do between job changes. Hycolor MultiDrive combined with the patented Intellistart 2 with navigated operation cuts the time needed for a wash up by 50%.

Thirlby adds: “It is the overall philosophy of what we can do that makes the difference. It becomes a process, reducing the human interventions where errors can be made.” The algorithms must take account of what a customer needs and when they need them. This drives the decisions on when to produce and how to produce for maximum efficiency. This might mean running jobs which use the same board in sequence or those which have the same color set up on press rather than in customer order or when they were received.

When Heidelberg delivers up to 18-units of Speedmaster XL106 with a huge choice of options to cover reverse printing, inline foiling and coating as well as spot colors, dysfunctional make ready would make such a machine uneconomic to operate. It needs to be making ready quickly and running at 18,000sph; at WestRock - MPS in Scotland it is, alongside a 17-unit machine installed a couple of years ago.

“You have to understand the customer’s focus day in and day out,” Thirlby continues. This will drive the decision making process, so that one printer might end up with one press instead of two, another with an 18-unit machine, a third with a B2 Anicolor 75 (very popular for short run pharmaceutical work where toner presses struggle to achieve the special colors required by very demanding customers), and a fourth with a Primefire 106.

Industrial digital printing with Primefire 106
The Primefire 106 is the B1 inkjet press that was unveiled at Drupa 2016 and which adds a further string to Heidelberg’s bow. It prints seven colors to cover almost the entire Pantone spectrum at 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution using an inkjet system jointly developed by Fujifilm and Heidelberg, and allowing production of food packaging thanks to its Swiss Ordinance certified inks.

Starting at 2,500 sheets an hour and reaching 4,000 with its upcoming productivity mode, the Primefire 106 can produce non-stop, up to 1,5 million digitally printed sheets per month thanks to its robustness and uptime.

“The business growth possibilities that digital print offers to packaging converters are endless. Whether by adding personalization, customization or security features to your existing products, by creating new offerings for your brands or by increasing the profitability of your short runs, in order to grow your digital business, you must rely on a printing technology that’s robust enough to produce at industrial levels,” says Montserrat Peidro-Insa, Heidelberg’s head of digital print. “Otherwise digital printing will be limited to only niche applications.”

Heidelberg is thinking in terms of high volume digital production as its first customer WestRock - MPS in Germany will demonstrate. They are currently using their Primefire 106 for quick prototyping of food, cosmetic and tobacco products as well as for on-demand printing of highly demanding hair coloring packaging. Each order can be a combination of different SKUs, each in different numbers. Primefire 106 can cope with both frequencies and requirements while ensuring the color of each hair dye is accurately reproduced. 

The second customer is colordruck Baiersbronn in Germany, a renowned folding carton converter planning to build a new business model around Primefire 106 and the personalization of packaging. 
Many other companies have already reserved their Primefire 106 unit. Among them is August Faller, a pharmaceutical specialist where digital printing will make possible the traceability of drugs by using unique codes on each box.

And the applications go well beyond this. Brands and retailers need to control their costs, so stock levels are coming under scrutiny as never before. It is wasteful to print in high volumes and have to recycle boxes that are not used before they become out of date as a result of a design change or a shift in legislation. Fast response, zero defect printing, delivers against this challenge with inkjet printing the ultimate expression of this. “We have brands coming to us asking when they can use it because they want it now,” she says.

With what’s already in place and the roadmap they have in place, Heidelberg’s position as the leading supplier to carton producers is secure.

www.heidelberg.com