With digitisation, Comexi moving towards autonomous machines

A few years ago, Comexi, a global supplier of solutions for the flexible packaging printing and converting sector, realised that digitisation would be one of the challenges of innovation to transform products and services, as well as allowing machines to become increasingly autonomous. Today, all capital goods manufacturers are immersed in service activities in order to give more value to their customers. This value has to solve their real problems, and offer real, updated, filtered and 24h/WW data. Most likely, one of the biggest challenges facing the industry is to be more competitive in production efficiency. The availability of the machine and the reduction of setups are some of the great opportunities where the technologies associated with Industry 4.0 can have more of an influence by giving visibility to processes and bottlenecks. Additionally, good machine data management is the basis to define preventive and predictive actions that will surely improve production.

The incorporation of a holistic approach to every conversion process will improve a new era of continuous progress that accelerates the decision-making process due to digitalization. For the past years, Comexi had been working on this development, which began showing results in 2016 with Comexi Cloud. This innovative service platform is able to assist customers with the improvement of their plant performance through the analysis of real-time production data, allowing them to build and develop smart factories. Furthermore, this online platform has completely transformed the manner in which printers and converters manage all types of processes due to its ability to visualise, compile, analyse, and store all data.

Comexi Cloud is composed of different digital services linked to machines and the data these machines generate. When the Comexi F4 press was integrated into Comexi Cloud in 2016, the first of these services emerged: Production Analytics. This is the fastest and easiest method to analyse production, understand data and processes, as well as have job costing knowledge of printing and converting processes. This data gives the customer relevant production information enabling them to make the most appropriate decisions. Gradually, Comexi’s other business units have also been integrated, and more services such as Job Costing, Technical Docs, and COOL have been added.

Job Costing

Comexi presents a new service which allows the analysis of the production costs and consumptions of every manufacturing order that is executed by the machine. Job Costing gives knowledge and an analysis of real-time production costs and consumption through the data automatically being processed by the machine, including the consumption of energy, ink and consumables, which are generated from the energy consumption module or the ink weighing module.

This new service is fully integrated into the Production Analytics service, giving customers access to the complete cost and consumption history of each production order or machine, in turn enabling them to analyse trends and the future cost or consumption of repetitive projects. The Data Export allows the customers to connect and obtain data from the platform through their internal or external systems, thus avoiding machine manipulation and offering net production data.

This is a new step towards the interconnection and simplification of data management of Comexi's products, offering plug and play systems that allow customers to focus their efforts on the optimisation of their production processes.

Predictive maintenance

As a result of Comexi Cloud, customers have at their disposal all the necessary machine information: customers can manage spare parts and consult updated machine documentation.

Currently, Comexi is developing the use of predictive maintenance and machine critical stop prediction through the analysis of normal working conditions, and establishing patterns which are considered good behaviour or altered behaviour, and could lead to a critical error, thus resulting in a printing defect or a machine stop.

The objective of Comexi is to make machines which are able to generate relevant, valuable and real-time production data. One path to achieve this, is the complete automation of machine configuration and set up, the latter being based on applying machine learning algorithms to all data stored in the Comexi Cloud, which includes, amongst others, speed, waste, availability and quality. All this would not be possible without digitisation.

In the era of digitisation, Comexi wants to be one step ahead of its competitors, always offering their customers the best options and value-added solutions with their products.