Hands off finishing for Drupa

Automation will be ubiquitous at Drupa. The reasoning is two fold: printers need to cope with a sharp rise in short run production jobs, while dealing with a shortfall in labour, let alone skilled labour. Automation can address both these trends.

There will be automatic loading of plates to a sheetfed press; there will be folding and binding machines that adjust on the fly; there will be finishing lines that can deliver different products with no hands involved. There will be robot arms to load pallets, to load paper to a press, to a folder or perfect binder. There will be automated mobile robots to move pallets of work from the end of a press into the next processing stage.

It is not always new. Muller Martini’s Connex workflow has been in place for many years. It is now being linked to sustainability as automation is a key way to reduce waste. The company has a Smart Factory concept able to deliver run of one products without creating start up waste. Last year’s acquisition of Hunkeler will give Muller Martini further processes to include in the Connex environment.

At Drupa the company is promising to link its Antaro perfect binder, SigmaLine Compact, Primera Pro stitcher and Venture MC200 sewer in an integrated production flow and handling different product types to emulate the demands on a print business. 

It is also promising a first Hunkeler product as part of the Muller Martini stand and environment.

Horizon is one of the companies that will make extensive use of robots, to load book blocks to a binder, to move work in progress and to load products to a pallet or to load a case for customer shipment. The labour shortage in Japan is particularly acute, hence automation is crucial. Horizon has IceLink as its connected workflow, taking job information from a central production management system to adjust the settings on its machines from data accesses via barcode. Work in progress data is fed back to the central hub as well as on to the next production step in the Horizon network.

Tecnau, like Hunkeler, is about working on the inline finishing processes for continuous feed and cut sheet inkjet presses. These are pushing into commercial printing so need greater productivity. One way to achieve this is through being able to change or load reels of paper without having to stop the press. Both have automated the reel changing process as well as being able to adjust slitting and cross cutting to produce book of one and similar.

Duplo will surely have further developments in terms of automating processes to make it simpler to operate its products, but also moving up to create more sophisticated products, larger sheet sizes and to appeal to larger print businesses.