Printing Innovation Asia Issue 5 2021
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Robotic plate supply for a highly automated print shop Meinders & Elstermann is a family-owned company with a 135-year history and a fully-equipped print shop with a solid foundation.
Around 150 employees are working on three 8-colour and one 10-colour sheet fed offset press as well as a state-of-the-art bookbinding shop. Their material workflow is constantly upgraded and a key area where an upgrade took place a few months ago was in plate production, where plate logistics was redesigned together with BEIL Systems. With its state-of-the-art machinery, the M&E printing house is able to realize very high-volume and complex orders even within a very short time. Depending on the customer's requirements, the manufacturing depth can cover all stages of production from the creation of the data to the final letter shop work. More and more printing plates needed The introduction of a new MIS system in 2016 was already carried out with the idea of a future full network integration of the entire company. Two years later, the production planning and control
systems were updated, and, among other things, the classic paper-based process was quickly obsolete. The interconnection of all machines was critical , in order to communicate and process all necessary information for production. A spatial change made a replacement of the previously used plate production line necessary, as there was already considerably less space available during the planning. Whereas before classic thermal plates were still in use, these were now replaced by process less plates in the sense of ecological thought. The highest possible automation is sought Due to the ever-increasing and faster advancing versioning into short runs, the number of printing plates required and the associated requirements for in-house logistics have increased significantly in recent years. This necessitated a more reliable and simpler solution of producing printing plates.
In this way, the time spent by the employees for making plates is to be reduced. These were relatively high in the old configuration with a multicassette loader and a skid loader as well as the manual charging of the shooters. The M&E printing house wanted the highest possible automation of all process steps and the possibility of running the system independently without personnel. Of course, reliability was also a big issue, as was plate throughput. While the supplier was retained for the CTPs, M&E Druckhaus was looking for a new, strong and reliable partner for the logistics of the plates. BEIL Systems was also able to convince with an innovative solution for feeding plates to the CTPs. Beil was chosen because of their experience with lights out automation and unique design build capabilities. This concept includes a 6-axis robot in the plate production at Meinders & Elstermann, that can pick up the
