On May 23rd and 24th, more than 250 visitors from Greater China as well as from Asia Pacific regions joined the Packaging Day at Heidelberg Print Media Center in Shanghai, China. Under the theme “Think out of the Box”, they were able to see for themselves the latest Packaging Solutions from Heidelberg, which is aimed to help them stand out from the market competition, and continuously grow a profitable business and sustainable development in the digital era.
Heidelberg offers solutions for consistent Packaging Workflow with complete end-to-end box production. All presentations and demos showed the visitors the complete process chain until the finished box. Also, seamless integration of die cutting, inspection and folding carton glueing are all essential for an effective packaging production.
There is huge potential for the Packaging printing market. In the next five years, Asia Pacific region will come out at the top of the list in terms of market size and market growth rate of packaging printing. In China, the overall market development potential remains promising in the coming years. Thanks to the process of urbanization and the expansion of the middle class in China, continuous demands for packaging printing products will be driven forward.
“In fact, the packaging printing market in China is facing some challenges similar to those encountered in developed countries, e.g. increasing demands for spot color and special effects, higher demands for standardized production, diversified job orders with increasingly shorter run length and faster delivery time, higher requirements on flexibility and OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). It is time ‘to think out of the box’”, explained Benny Huang, CEO of Heidelberg Greater China, in his opening speech.
Heidelberg provides suitable solutions to address the above issues. With the “Smart Print Shop” concept, print shops are able to use smart, intelligently networked production environments to achieve an outstanding performance. Thus the way is paved for navigated and autonomous printing, with efficient production and completing ever shorter job runs profitably, as well as much less manual interventions, lower error rate and lower waste.
Highlights of the Packaging Day
The foundation for “Smart Print Shop” concept is the Prinect workflow, which was presented at the event in the first place. Thanks to Prinect, the live demonstration machines and processes have become so intelligent that the upstream process all the way to the press has been fully networked and automated, which quite impressed the guests.
The Prinect Packaging Designer software was introduced to the guests in particular. Packaging print shops can benefit from its extensive library with more than 1,800 scalable designs and components, which enable them to draft folding cartons and create the corresponding layouts in a very simple way. The Speedmaster CD 102-7+L and Speedmaster CX 75-4 played a key role during the live demonstrations, which attracted many visitors’ attention.
The “Thank you box” was the central theme and its production was shown from the intro presentation until the finished box as a customer gift. This box printed on CD 102-7+L showcased the Heidelberg Multicolor solution, which is the colour substitution to Pantone as well as enlargement of colour space. Using Multicolor solution print shops could benefit from the reduction of washing and make-ready times and enormous potential for material savings. The box was finished with Masterwork Postpress Solutions, die cutting with Easymatrix 106 CS, inspection with Diana Eye and folding carton glueing with Diana Easy.
Another demo job of CD 102-7+L was a cosmetics box. The most challenging applications on this job were the opaque white on the silver board, and the Prinect Image Control 3 was the perfect solution here. With the Image Control 3 quality and colour measuring system, print shops are able to measure and control opaque white using a completely standard quality control strip for the first time. Press operators can now save and access the target colour values more easily and Prinect Image Control 3 ensures reliable control of day-to-day print production. In the meantime, DripOff varnishing application was processed in one pass. In a further step additional embossing was done by a die cutter.
Speedmaster CX 75, the multi-talent, entry-packaging-machine, also produced two jobs showing the customer benefit in packaging printing: quick and easy job change as well as user-friendliness. Lifecycle Solutions with the components Saphira consumables and services are an essential part of Heidelberg’s solution offering to customers for achieving top quality, productivity, and production reliability.
The up-to-date Lifecycle Solutions were integrated into presentations of CD 102 Job 1 – CX 75 – CD 102 Job 2. After printing demo the Multicolor Job was directly referenced to Lifecycle with Multicolor Kit from Saphira. At the same time, Heidelberg also celebrated the tenth anniversary of the “Saphira” brand. With Saphira, Heidelberg offers an extensive portfolio of high-quality consumables, both for everyday print jobs and special applications, as well as all production requirements for prepress, press and postpress.
On May 24-25th, the “Think out of the Box” – Heidelberg Packaging Day also received guests from print shops in other countries in Asia Pacific region. Stephan Plenz, member of the Heidelberg Management Board responsible for Digital Technology welcomed all the guests and strengthened customers‘ confidence in Heidelberg Packaging Solutions. “With our comprehensive packaging printing solutions that combines efficiency and cost-effectiveness with consistent quality, we help customers make more business and profit. The show today will provide you with new ideas and inspiration to boost up your business,” explained Stephan Plenz in his welcome speech.
Thomas Frank, Head of Heidelberg Asia Pacific summarized: “Packaging Printing in Asia is changing dramatically. The challenges for the printers are manifold. But there are solutions such as our Prinect workflow. With Prinect Multicolor workflow, Saphira consumables and a high-performance 7-color Speedmaster print shops can boost their productivity and cut the costs significantly. This is what we can demonstrate in our demo centre in Shanghai. The showroom is tailor-made for the needs of Asian printers. Apart from our workflow software, digital and offset presses we now also have the full range of Postpress equipment on display, for both Packaging and Commercial Printers.”
On May 23rd, visitors attended a delivery ceremony in Qingpu factory in Shanghai, where a Speedmaster CD 102-7+L with its press number 888 was delivered to the end-user Dongguan New Island Printing Co. Ltd. New Island Printing Co. Ltd., started as a family-sized print shop in Hong Kong, has become one of the leading and reputable printing and packaging companies in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Today they mainly produce high-quality packaging and paper products with the capability to cater to various industries worldwide. The Dongguan site is the largest manufacturing plant of New Island Printing Group. A start-to-finish service is provided to serve mainland China as well as foreign markets, with their prepress facilities, seven and eight colour Heidelberg sheetfed presses, converting lines as well as automated and manual-assembly lines.
Guests also visited the workshop of Heidelberg Qingpu factory and had a closer look at Heidelberg´s equipment on the assembly line and the final testing area. They were impressed by the high level of automation in Qingpu factory. Qingpu is the production site of Heidelberg Group in Asia. There is the assembly of small-, medium- and large-format presses mainly for the Chinese and also the other Asian markets. The assembly commenced in 2006. Qinqpu plant is part of the Heidelberg production network. It has 450 staff for production and 150 for sales and service in the Shanghai area.
In connection with the visit of Qingpu over 70 customers from Indonesia, India, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines also took the chance to visit the factory of MK Masterwork in Tianjin, some two hours’ drive south-east of Beijing. They were impressed by the factory tour, the presentations of the Easymatrix 106 FC and Powermatrix 106 CSB and the company own graphic museum.
Since four years Heidelberg established a cooperative agreement with MK Masterwork. The two manufacturing giants have been working hard to build a cohesive sales and support programme for their combined range of printing and converting technology. The current product portfolio includes die cutters, foil stamping machines, sheet inspection technology, and folder gluers. Over 700 people are working in a 150,000 sq/m facility – it represents the equivalent of 18 soccer pitches.
