What is it?

All through 2024 Heidelberg has been dropping hints about a forthcoming workflow automation product that it predicts will be revolutionary, except you won’t be able to buy it for another year.

It’s called Prinect Touch Free, and promises cloud-based and completely hands-off job scheduling that intelligently determines the best production path at any given time and can react instantly and automatically to any changes. It will work with Heidelberg’s range, plus very many third party products that it has already written links to for its Prinect Production Manager workflow.

It’s a part of Heidelberg’s goal of fully automated print production, end-to-end from order receipt to despatch. Driving factors are Heidelberg’s analysis of the effects of smaller but more numerous print runs that mean minimising touchpoints for efficiency, with the need for ever more sophisticated automation, including the catch-all AI, to compensate for both pressurised margins and the much-discussed skills shortage and recruitment challenge throughout the industry. With Heidelberg’s on-off embrace of digital presses being firmly on again, it’s also talking about hybrid digital-litho production.

Heidelberg first mentioned Prinect Touch Free in its Drupa press conferences, but went into a bit more detail in a customer and press event at its German HQ in October (Printweek: www.bit.ly/3Vktn2K). However Printweek’s report was a bit too optimistic about availability, as we got the impression that there was already a user site.

Axel Zöller, head of product management for Prinect, now says that what he calls a ‘concept’ site at a so-far unnamed printer in Holland will start in January. Heidelberg hopes to be demonstrating results by next summer, with a view to releasing initial versions to users at the end of 2025. Zöller expects “full functionality in the later part of 2026.”

Initially the system will only work with Heidelberg’s digital presses, the Ricoh-based Versafire toner presses and the forthcoming Canon-based Jetfire 50 and 75 sheetfed inkjets. However, it will progressively be rolled out to work with Heidelberg’s litho range, and to a large range of third-party MIS and production machinery. Zöller says that this should happen quickly, as Heidelberg already has Prinect links to about 1,500 third-party systems.

“We don’t usually announce so early,” says Zöller. “But this is so different that we want to talk about it.” It’s been in development for three years, but he says Heidelberg wanted to give the market an idea of what was coming, so it could consult with potential users about their needs. It also tied in with the announcement of the deal with Canon for its sheetfed inkjet presses.

What he didn’t say was that Heidelberg might also have been announcing early to reassure shareholders and customers in the wake of its April liquidation of Zaikio, a German company it acquired in 2019 and which had been working on a plug-and-play universal “print connectivity platform” that was intended to be better and easier to implement than JDF (Printweek Star Product December 2020/January 2021).

Details are vague outside Heidelberg, but it seems that Zaikio couldn’t make the platform work, and so Heidelberg is starting again but with different ambitions. According to Zöller: “We could have used Zaikio technology, but it became clear a year ago that it was not going to succeed with the connectivity.”

He admits that the initial development versions of Prinect Touch Free will use some Zaikio technology to get up and running, but says this will be phased out before the commercial release.

How will it work

Zöller says that most of today’s main production workflow networks – citing Kodak Prinergy, Agfa Apogee and Screen Trueflow – were originally developed in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Technology and business needs have moved on, and in particular there’s a need for more automation with fewer touchpoints.

According to Zöller, the “revolutionary” part is because “Prinect Touch Free is totally different, in that we do not provide tools any more. It analyses a job, the metadata, etc, and it knows all the production equipment available. Our software defines the most effective method of production that keeps to the delivery date.”

We’ve heard a lot about intelligent scheduling from MIS developers in recent years, some of which use the AI term because it sounds whizzy, though most will admit that these are more like ‘expert systems’ when questioned more closely. It’s all terminology. Although it deals with costs, Zöller stresses that Touch Free does not replace an MIS, but works with it. On the other hand many MIS include automatic schedulers and it’s not yet clear whether or not it will replace the need for these.

“Current MIS take a lot of setup and then a lot of integration,” says Zöller. “Then you can send the information to a production system and it can execute JDF/JMF. We call this Level 2 connection and it takes a huge effort to set up.

“Prinect Touch Free has the automation already included. It connects at Level 1, meaning only basic information such as job number, number of copies needed and delivery date needs to be entered. We already have all the machine information available in the software. You just need to give it your costs. Actually it can begin directly with pre-set ‘guesses,’ which you can later override with your own real costs. It will be self-updating by comparing its initial calculations to real costs.”

This basic job information is entered through an Order App. After that, internally, Prinect Touch Free has three main stages: Pathfinder, which calculates at all the possible production paths for a given job; Decision Maker, which decides which works best given the job needs and what else is going on in the factory; and Auto Scheduler, that books time on the various processes.

In principle Touch Free is completely automatic and runs in the background, he says. Any changes to the paths will be detected and applied in the background. Users can however monitor what’s going on though the Order App, “to give the operators the confidence that the automation is working”.

It is a cloud-based system and scalable and expandable, but needs the user to be running the Heidelberg Prinect Production Manager locally to direct the files and take the job instructions, says Zöller.

He says that Touch Free uses the jobs’ metadata, “where we read and then calculate all possible meaningful production paths, then we schedule it”.

“If something changes,” he adds, “then we can re-do the whole path. We can look and optimise continually, and constantly update based on other current jobs coming in, machine availability, and operator availability. Normally, a change means re-calculating the whole path. But we have pre-calculated all possible paths already, so there is no need to recalculate.

“The revolution is compared to current production systems, especially the amount of effort needed to get automation setup. Nobody has to manually re-set anything. HP, Canon, Xerox, you name it – the majority of machines are already connected to Prinect and we can drive it.”

Although the production paths will initially only be calculated for digital presses, Zöller says that “We can take the job in and calculate it for digital, but if it turns out that litho is better, we send the instruction to Production Manager and it goes to the plate maker. The customer will not care if it is calculated in the cloud or through Production Manager.”

He says the initial “concept” user in Holland will be running a Heidelberg Jetfire press when available, as well as Ricoh and Konica Minolta toner presses.