It aims to boost its market position with Bobst Novacut 106 ER

In the fall of 2021, Höhn Display + Packaging installed the Bobst Novacut 106 ER, the world’s first flat-bed diecutter with the new Accuregister’ contactless’ sheet-register system. Höhn is an old-established manufacturer of games, displays, and folding boxes, and its customers believe it has set an example by putting into service this Autoplatine diecutter with inline blanking.

Today it’s a 2.4-millimeter litho-laminated corrugated board, tomorrow 100-gram paper, after that environmentally-friendly solid or recyclable cardboard, Höhn Display + Packaging works with a wide range of materials. “Our extensive product range poses a real challenge to the flexibility of our machine technology, particularly in diecutting,” explains Markus Laepple, operations manager of the company headquartered in Ulm, Germany

“No matter which material the new machine is processing, the quality is consistently at the top level. The register precision and flatness of our gameboards, for instance, stand out on the market. Our customers’ procurement and quality managers see the difference,” affirms Laepple, a trained offset printer who has been working in the packaging industry for more than 20 years.

It’s obvious that innovative technology plays a key role. Höhn considers Accuregister one of the main performance features of the Novacut 106 ER. “Accuregister underscores our high-quality demands. And our products confirm that we really are a tad better,” states Laepple.

The new sheet-register system is based on the legendary optical Power Register, brought to market by Bobst over 20 years ago and unique to this day. For the Accuregister, Bobst has adapted the best attributes of the Power Register specifically to the Novacut line. The new sheet-register system thus enables very short setup times in the diecutting process. At the same time, it minimizes stops caused by the feeder. As a result, waste is reduced in both the setup and production processes, making the production process and the products more sustainable.

Accuregister aligns the sheets at full speed, without mechanical stops, ‘contactless’ and thus gently. Laepple adds, “Accuregister reliably exploits this, especially with thin paper and material laminated on both sides.” The high-performance system cameras read both printed images and marks. And if that’s not possible, the cameras simply read the sheet edges. When the sheets are fed into the machine, the system calculates within milliseconds the corrections required and automatically remedies them as the sheets accelerate; over a wide correcting range, up to ±6millimeter in the forwarding direction and ±13millimeter in the lateral direction, even with transparent material.

Bobst offers various options for the Novacut line to make the processing, and thereby the register precision, of different materials even more flexible. Höhn Display + Packaging uses the antistatic device for processing paper and the heavy board equipment for processing sheets that are not entirely flat.

Laepple says, “High register precision is increasingly important. For instance, just recently, a customer carefully checked the accordance of braille embossing on the front and back sides of a box. But we do not have to worry about register precision since using Accuregister.” During the alignment of the cut-to-print register, the system even compensates for print tolerances.

“The list of audit questions our customers ask is getting longer. Their queries typically concern conventional errors, which we have eliminated by using the Novacut 106 ER in our diecutting process. Our customers realize this and adapt their audit questions accordingly. This means we no longer address certain issues in future audits,” Laepple boils it down. In other words, the new diecutter has further increased customer confidence in the reliability of Höhn Display + Packaging’s production process.

“We proactively communicate the benefits of our new technology to the market and explain which errors can no longer happen in our process,” says Laepple. So naturally, customers are glad to take Höhn up on that. “A frequent question, for example, is whether the high register precision of Accuregister means layouts and fonts can be set closer to the rills. The Novacut 106 ER has indeed made that possible.” So, in a nutshell, customers have a bit more freedom when it comes to product design.

The production runs at Höhn Display + Packaging range from 700 to 600,000 sheets, at an average of 9,000 sheets. The company has selected a Novacut 106 ER with an hourly output of up to 8,000 sheets for efficient execution of large orders. Today, the machine runs in three shifts depending on the job, and the machine is changed several times a day.

For repeat orders, Höhn’s Novacut 106 ER requires now only about one half-hour setup time, although currently, one of every two diecut jobs is a new order. Laepple: “We are working on optimizing setup times.” Höhn is using various options Bobst has provided for the diecutter. Examples include the Setup Time Reduction Pack and the Chase Changer.

The ease of use of the Novacut 106 ER user interface (HMI Sphere) also supports short setup times. It features a largely self-explanatory guided menu. “We needed only two days of training for it,” Laepple recalls. Another reason for the short setup times is that Höhn Display + Packaging acquires its diecutting tools only from manufacturers certified by Bobst. This ensures high tool quality. Höhn furthermore has its tools fitted with TooLink. This means that chips are built into the diecutting tools, which then register the data of every diecutting job. The next time the tools are introduced into the machine, the data is read directly into the HMI, allowing for immediate identification of individual diecutting jobs and automatically setting HMI values.

Considering the wide range of products and the size of the print runs, Laepple believes that currently, Höhn Display + Packaging can hardly use a highly automated diecutter like the Expertcut to capacity. If the day comes when greater capacity is needed, space has been left between the three Bobst flat-bed diecutters for a format six machine or a ‘fast machine’ fully equipped with logistics. “When it comes to investment decisions, we take a holistic view of our suppliers. The result clearly supported further stepping up our partnership-based cooperation with Bobst,” calculates Laepple.

He believes Bobst has its finger on the pulse with a view of the industry that builds on the pillars of digitization, automation, connectivity, and sustainability. This will always open new perspectives for process optimization and is particularly true for the Bobst Connect platform. In addition to the remote technical support Helpline Plus, Höhn Display + Packaging is already using the productivity apps Remote Monitoring and Downtime Tracking. They help to exploit fully and continuously boost the performance of its new diecutter by using data-based analyzes.

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.

The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.

Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.

As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.

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