New Ideas for Corrugated Digital Printing and Packaging Workflows: Innovate and Expand!

New Ideas for Corrugated Digital Printing and Packaging Workflows: Innovate and Expand!

More and more companies are enhancing their traditional packaging production with digital printing solutions, while digital business operations are expanding into the folding carton and corrugated box industry and boosting their business. These enterprises are also supported by a growing number of automated workflow solutions worth investigating.

Wouldn't it be ideal if you could create a workflow environment with no errors at every touchpoint, even the most complex orders from order to delivery? Wouldn't it be especially useful if you could create pre-built scenarios that would cover your most basic jobs as well as your most challenging productions? The good news is that there are solutions on the market today that allow you to move into an automated environment that increases efficiency and productivity, while freeing up your employees for things that require manual work.

To enter a world of hassle-free automation that will allow you to drive manufacturing at the pace of a supercar, start by identifying your current manufacturing and workflow elements. Your digital corrugated ecosystem may contain dozens of parts. These sections will vary depending on the type of operation you are running. If the face paper is printed first, and then the corrugated paper is formed, a set of processes needs to be performed, and the process of printing directly on the corrugated board will be slightly different. In short there are many common elements, so let's start with these elements.

Innovations in order capture and follow-up

01

In the traditional packaging world, contracts are determined by size, shape and volume requirements, and most orders do not require high volume printing, even for long-term contracts that use static images. In the world of digital corrugated packaging, placing an order can be a bit more involved. Orders tend to be shorter and may include custom or personalized instructions that add flow before printing on face paper or cardboard media. Therefore, you need to take an inventory of the onboarding environment of the job to ensure that not only the actual job content of the finished product is captured, but also the printing requirements. Keep in mind that printed documents on face or cardboard may require approval from the agent or product owner, further complicating upstream processes!

You need a system that allows you to manage customer design documents and approval processes, and that system will be linked to your ERP for efficient business management and production management. Many web-to-print platforms are designed to integrate online design tools, manage design files entered through customer portals, and push those orders to the next production step in the workflow. Can you do it today?

If your sales team sells in person and receives orders via email, you face a bigger challenge than your existing online workflow. Innovation in digital packaging will require innovation in order capture and follow-up.

When doing order capture, keep in mind that quotes and estimates will require innovation. In modern corrugated digital printing, you will need a way to consider the value proposition of different types of face and corrugated paperboards and how they can improve your upsell capabilities. If the material being undertaken goes beyond basic brown kraft paper, the quotation and estimation system database must be updated to take into account not only cost variances, but value variances as well. If you're still using spreadsheets for estimates, napkin calculations, and estimating the ingenuity of your team, now is the time to check out comprehensive quotes and estimates from workflow vendors and upgrade your tools. Managing a large number of small orders (a major part of digital corrugated production) requires automation.

Workflow Innovation

02

You will need to automate every touchpoint in your workflow for maximum efficiency. This may take some time, but automation is essential as the number of orders per day, smaller order runs, and the variable nature of orders become part of the day-to-day operations.

No one can manage workflow on a personal spreadsheet, whiteboard or notepad. Innovations emerging across all workflow vendors in the packaging market, including shop floor data collection to provide data for business and production floor dashboards. They are integrating feedback loops for order-by-order ink estimation to feed data into consumables management and costing engines. They link directly to the machine interface to capture minute-by-minute data points from the machine blocking to normal operation. Many people use artificial intelligence (the focus of Industry 4.0) in their infrastructure.

But none of this means anything if you're not ready to enable these innovative options. In factories around the world, while some great innovative equipment is installed, they are often bypassed in favor of a consistent way of doing things, which has stalled innovation. Please check your factory to see if any tools that are not installed are installed and fully used.

If you find that your tool doesn't provide a path to full automation, ask your vendor how to get you there. Innovative solutions exist to automate your prepress tasks, separating jobs that require human intervention from orders that may enter the press queue. Many people can take your PDF and preflight it, then fix and fix most issues before production. Since barcodes are essential, most solutions have the ability to add barcodes.

Today, the leading software providers for digital corrugated printing know that you have to automate to be successful. Whether you are a current customer of theirs or are using a custom system today, make an appointment with the packaging software provider to chat and request their workflow roadmap. Each of them wants to help you add innovation to your workflow so you can increase the number of orders you can process before you hit a breakthrough. However, they are not guides! They need to know the order you're going to fulfill and your current level of automation to help you create the best automated workflow with as few manual touchpoints as possible.