W indmoeller & H oelscher Executive Outlook
Klaus Kleemann Vice President of Sales
yond the company’s own boundaries and includes suppliers and customers. For example, the different hardware, namely the machines and software have to work together seamlessly. This is an important new area of activity and innovation for equipment suppli ers. There are still too many system gaps and inter faces between prepress, individual presses and downstream equipment. Digitally networked intelli gent machines are the key to further increasing pro ductivity, profits and customer satisfaction. The VISION Assistance System from W&H is fullyin tegrated into the press and PROCONTROL unit (user interface). Typically, components come from a num ber of different suppliers and all have their own con trol units. With the VISION system, all components
What, more than anything else, do you think flexo printers should be most focused on right now? More than anything else, printers need to focus on maximizing efficiency and print quality. Some of the reasons for this are the continued trend for shorter runs, the need for quicker changeovers and the abili ty to achieve high quality as the jobs become more demanding and sophisticated. At W&H we give our customers the tools to keep up with this trend in order to remain competitive and produce the highest quality products using fully integrated features, such as EASYSET and EASYREG for quick job setups and wastefree registration and our new intelligent VISION system, which is the only fullyintegrated vision and defect detection system currently on the market. Another part of maximizing efficiency on any equipment is getting interested and qualified peo ple to run machines. This is a welldocumented challenge across manufacturing worldwide. To top that off, the current unemployment rate in the U.S. hovers around 4%, so it’s hard to find the right peo ple because the labor pool isn’t very big. Our goal is to help customers fill this gap with intelligent, intu itive solutions on the machines that make maximiz ing efficiency easy. What areas of technology will guide the future of flexo technology? The future of flexographic technology will lie in the integration of the individual press components. For a few years, the hot topic in the manufacturing world has been Industry 4.0 — the smart connected facto ry of the future embracing automation, communica tion and integration of manufacturing technologies to optimize the value chain from raw material acqui sition to production of the final product. At W&H, we call this “Packaging 4.0” Printers’ value chains are becoming more dynamic. Production processes are linked between work steps and production sites. This networking also goes be
are controllable from one common user interface. This makes setup easier and increases efficiency of the press. How is W&H poised to assist flexo printers in growing their businesses in today’s environment? W&H has spearheaded innova
tion in flexographic printing for decades, including developing gamechanging technologies ranging from the first gearless press to the first sideloading sleeve press to the first automatic impression and registration systems to the first automatic washup system and now continues to work on fullyintegrat ed, connected and intelligent systems. Our dedication to Research & Development and creating new technologies to benefit our customers is as much in the forefront of our mission as ever and with that in mind, we are ideally poised to con tinue finding solutions for our customers. With all of these technological advancements, it’s crucial for a customer to be able to get in touch with the machine supplier when needed, because down time is expensive. W&H offers all our customers the unique service of being able to actually speak with a W&H degreed engineer in our Information & Diag nostics Center 24/7/365 in order to trouble shoot and keep the press up and running.
22 Executive Outlook Flexo Market News
www.nvpublications.com
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs