Visitors to Labelexpo will be able to see the newly developed integration between finishing systems manufacturer ABG and software developer Cerm, which sees ABG equipment prepped for the job from the MIS/ERP, saving time and easing a production bottleneck.
Matt Burton, sales director at ABG – supplied in Australia and New Zealand by APPMA member Currie Group – said, “ABG is the only finishing supplier with this level of integration with an MIS provider. We have invested heavily in software development over the past three years. This integration will save about eight minutes per slitter setup and about two minutes per batch of rolls coming out of the turret. Our customers will really benefit from our development of this integration.”
The Currie Group Labels & Packing Team will be attending Labelexpo to host customers whilst at the exhibition, including printers looking at ABG finishing systems. Any enquiries can be made to info@curriegroup.com.au.
The trend to short runs and the ability of presses to get their set-up date from the MIS have led to bottlenecks in finishing, which ABG says the new integration overcomes.
In what it says is an industry milestone, all computer-driven slitters and rewinders that leave the ABG factory now can receive instructions from the printer’s MIS/ERP system, and can feed back information for production and costing.
Commenting on this milestone, Burton said, “We believe that automation and robotisation will continue to crawl into every print shop. 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 development partner for ABG in this development has been the Cerm MIS/ERP from the start. It 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, explains how it all works.
“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,” he said.
The feedback of the ABG machine will update the Cerm schedule and will allow for detailed job costing and waste or speed analysis.
