Day five of Heidelberg Innovation Week: Revolutionising print embellishments on folding cartons

“Our passion is to configure machines that economically create incredible effects such as cold foil applications, matte, gloss coating combinations and so on,” said, Markus Leichtle, senior manager, product management sheetfed at Heidelberg.

Heidelberg claims that its new Speedmaster generation revolutionises the production of special applications and manages job complexities with ease. As all processes are integrated into one press, the machine is equipped to produced high quality embellished folding cartons economically, in a single pass. “With our new generation of Heidelberg presses, a wide variety of configurations such as coatings before offset, triple coating applications after offset or inline finishing on the backside of the job in a single pass, have all been made possible for up to 20 units in a single press,” he added.

At that, using FoilStar – the cold foil module from Heidelberg which supports a host of unusual surface finishing effects for labels, packaging and high-quality commercial work, the converters can save up to 80% of foil material with higher production reliabilities.

In addition, with the help of the Prinect workflow systems powered by the Intellistart 3, printers can benefit from newly defined processes and better operator guidance across all work steps that optimise the entire workflow and minimise errors. “Besides this, navigated printing with Intellirun, which is a software that takes care of the entire printing process workflow, is the way ahead to achieve more flexibility and higher profits for special applications,” said Leichtle.

With these intelligent automated processes, consistent operator guidance and synchronised and optimised human-machine interactions during production, manual interventions are reduced to essential necessary while the process reliability is constantly ensured. And even the complex machine configurations become intuitive and easy to operate. “Since the complexities can now be mastered, there is real flexibility to use economical inline production for a wide variety of jobs,” he said.

Knowledge transfer has been a key part of the German-based press manufacturer’s essential services. Thus, along with technical pieces of advice, the company’s lifecycle solutions provide consumables that align with each printing production processes at the end of the converter. “For example, cold foil and adhesives always go together and our services ensure that there are no unpleasant surprises in the process.”

“The market for embellished folding cartons is growing, but products have to differentiate themselves at the point of sale, and we can enable printers to achieve this distinguished portfolio of high-quality jobs,” concluded Leichtle.