Packaging Solutions
For many years, interfaces between MIS/ERP and printing presses have successfully been reducing set up times on the printer’s shop floor, allowing a greater number, as well as an increase in smaller jobs, to be printed within the same timeframe. Obviously, the bottleneck of production has moved to the finishing department.
ABG has picked up this gauntlet and has rebuilt its complete machine software layer in the past three years. As a result, all computer driven slitters and rewinders that leave the ABG factory can now receive instructions from the printer’s MIS/ERP system and can feed back information for production and costing.
Matt Burton, ABG’s sales director, commented: ‘We believe that automation and robotisation will continue to crawl into every printshop. We have invested heavily to be on the forefront of this trend by offering our customers a zero job-setup time and by reducing the setup waste considerably on all our equipment.’
The sparring partner for ABG in this development has been the Cerm MIS/ERP from the start. The company has had many years of experience with pre-press and press information exchange and Cerm was already interfacing to some of the existing ABG machines on a more basic level.
Geert Van Damme, managing director of Cerm, explained: ‘The ABG slitter/rewinders receive all information about the print frames at the input and about the finished rolls as required output through scanning a barcode on the ABG. The slitting knives will be automatically positioned when jobs are switched. If you have a turret rewinder, the ABG printer will print a batch of identification labels and will close the rolls with these labels automatically after they are cut at the requested length. Cerm will have all these finished rolls in its database for traceability.’
The feedback of the ABG machine will update the Cerm schedule and will allow for detailed job costing and waste or speed analysis.
ABG (6A37) and Cerm (6A42) are showing this integration live at Labelexpo.
