A SOFTWARE MARKET OVERVIEW

A SOFTWARE MARKET OVERVIEW

Following on from his machinery overview in the previous edition of Packaging Europe, Fin Slater takes an industry-wide look at a selection of new and existing software products from across the packaging value chain.

Design

EngView Package & Display Designer Suite is a CAD/CAM solution for 2D design and 3D modelling of boxes and POP/POS displays.

The product seeks to optimize every aspect of the packaging and display design process, from 2D drafting of resizable structures, to applying artwork over the 3D model directly in Adobe Illustrator and then the creation of files for production that feed the printing and cutting machines.

The company is keen to stress that its product can “save valuable designer time, eliminate structural design and graphic errors, and save costs by reducing the number of samples that need to be produced.”

Chili Publish simplifies and automates graphics production, allowing users of any skill level to create artwork automatically. They have the choice to either edit customizable documents in a browser, or fully automate the production of both physical and digital designs.

On the potential applications for its software, the company told us: “There are two types of people who use our technology – brand owners, who buy our solution and integrate it with third party software like Esko Webcentre, and agencies who want to acquire the technology to build an application, like a tool that can automatically produce labels or a brand management platform.”

Efficiency

Esko recently announced a host of new features for its integrated software portfolio, Esko Software 20, with the aim of delivering operational efficiency improvements to the packaging value chain

Foremost amongst these is a latest generation native PDF editor for packaging and label prepress, ArtPro+ 20.0. With advantages including 70% faster trapping, significant time and material savings for staggered plate cutting, as well as simplification of shrink sleeve jobs, the latest software delivers a significant boost to prepress operational excellence.

EFI’s Packaging Suite provides workflows for an industry-wide range of applications – from labelling to flexible packaging.

According to the company, the software seeks to deliver efficiency by: “reducing touches, improving accuracy, automating complex operations, and delivering repeatable, profitable results.”

Business

In the company’s own words, Pack IOT is “the only plug-and-play, cloudbased production software for data collection and analysis for the packaging industry”. The software helps factories to look into data and identify key areas of success, as well as areas for improvement.

The company’s CEO told Packaging Europe: “Most packaging converters have more than 40% of downtime in their production lines without really knowing why. Through our plug-and-play software, specially developed for the packaging industry, we help them to understand what is really going on in their factories.”

Theurer’s theurer.com C3 is an ERP/MIS business management software platform for print and packaging. It seeks to cover every business process – from estimating and sales to production planning, logistics and controlling.

The platform prides itself on giving customers a consistent overview of all its features. All documents that are linked to an order are accessible in one place, and every receipt, pallet, packaging, or single roll used for the order can be seen in the document section of the software.

Labelling

Seagull Scientific’s BarTender product leverages over 30 years of experience to help customers create, automate and manage labels, barcodes, RFID tags and more.

It allows the user to design labels, connect them to a live database, integrate automated printing with existing business systems and launch print requests.

BarTender recently helped Spain’s largest manufacturer of bags for coffee and powdered milk for vending machines to standardize, streamline and automate its processes for designing, managing, and printing its product labels.

With the new system, the company went from manually working with 300–400 labels to automatically handling 5,000–6,000 labels.

Label Cloud from NiceLabel is a cloud labelling solution with four key features. The first of these allows customers to design labels using a

system with a Microsoft Word-style user experience. The company claims that no prior design experience is required to use this part of its software.

The solution allows labels to be stored in a centralized storage system, and the designs can be accessed for anywhere at any time using a web browser.

Label Cloud also lets the user integrate label printing with their product data, with the aim of preventing mislabelling and errors. As an additional efficiency offering, the platform allows labelling processes to be extended to other departments, as well as business partners. n