Europe’s printing sector is lowering costs and raising levels of efficiency through the increased introduction of automation. However, the companies leading the shift to digitization – such as printing equipment manufacturers and software developers – are able to use automation to generate big data on printing processes, including aspects like ink performance.

Ink manufacturers face, as a result, the dilemma of how to ensure that their position in the market is not weakened by a lack of means of obtaining similar amounts of information about the performance of their products.

Digitization data, particularly from online or real-time monitoring of printing processes with the help of sensors within machines, can provide unprecedented opportunities for improvements in printing and workflow processes.

Digitization businesses with access to printing data and the ability to analyze it and create algorithms to solve problems are already able, for example, to formulate inks for contract manufacturing to their specifications. They can then market the inks using the data as evidence of the products’ benefits.

Heidelberg and Pay Per Use
Automation of printing equipment and consumables like inks is enabling them to be sold on the basis of performance rather than the conventional way of individual products being purchased before use. Instead, the costs of the equipment and consumables are packaged into a single overall price expressed in per-unit terms.

“Pay per use is the future of our industry,” said an official at Heidelberg, which is pioneering the pay-per-use or subscription business model in printing in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Essentially, pay-per-use systems, under which products are effectively sold collectively, do not have to be operated by an equipment manufacturer but by a company with the capacity to collect, process and analyze data on a large scale. For companies without this capacity, like ink producers, it poses the threat of large communication gaps opening up between themselves and printers because the main marketing interface is between the pay-per-use equipment and consumables supplier and the printer.

Heidelberg, which is both a printing equipment manufacturer and a supplier of consumables, including inks, launched its new subscription business model late last year. Instead of buying Heidelberg’s presses and paying separately for its consumables or services, printers only pay for the number of sheets actually printed. All the printing equipment, consumables – inks, plates, coatings, washup solutions, and blankets – as well as advisory and technical services are included in the price per sheet.

Heidelberg contends that this pay-per-use system is radically different from the click-charge scheme operated by OEM digital press makers and other digital press suppliers, whose system is also based on a payment per sheet.

“The click charges are market prices,” said a Heidelberg spokesman. “With our system, we analyze a potential customer’s printing business and processes and work out what their costs are per page. Then we offer a per-page subscription which is lower than those costs. We know from the data how the customer can make improvements and increase sales. The higher their sales, the more we earn.”

By the end of August, Heidelberg had 20 printers signed up to subscription deals. By March next year, it is expecting the total to rise to at least 30 and by March 2020, to 100. “The numbers are increasing as we expected,” the spokesperson added. “Our targets should easily be met.”

Although the printing process and other data collected by Heidelberg during the five years of each subscription is legally owned by the customers, they will as part of each subscription deal have to give Heidelberg the right to make use of it.

“Data is a key part of our business model because it tells us how well the printing process is performing and where there can be improvements,” explained the spokesperson.
“With consumables like ink, the data shows us how well the printing presses are working with them,” he adds. Heidelberg makes its own coatings but the manufacture of its own-label inks is made by third parties, if necessary to Heidelberg’s specifications. “We work very closely with our ink producers.”

For more than 10 years it has been building up a repository from data generated by its on-site machines and from the application of its Prinect software covering workflows and other activities. Currently, as part of vendor inventory, maintenance and other services, it is provided with process data from 11,000 Heidelberg printing machines around the world and from 26,000 Prinect applications.

“We know that competitors also want to move over to a subscription business model covering conventional and digital processes,” said the spokesperson. “ But they cannot do it yet because they do not have enough data.”

Color Management and Data
For ink producers, a major data source for the provision of services has historically been color management – a segment which has become increasingly dominated by specialists serving a broad range of customers in most aspects of design, as well as printing, and which have been quick to make use of digitization.

Sun Chemical has recently upgraded its portable SunColorBox so that it can provide end-to-end color management through digitization. This enables brand colors to be reproduced consistently anywhere in the world, no matter what combination of printing technology and substrates are used.

Since it is a tool that operates in a fully digital workflow, providing colors matching original specifications, SunColorBox can be used by designers, brand owners, pre-media technicians and printers as well as ink manufacturers.

SunColorBox has also become a cloud-based solution which helps converters to manage private databases of spot colors by making them available digitally throughout the supply chain and production cycle.

However, in the provision of color measurement devices and software, ink producers have been continuing to meet growing competition from suppliers in other sectors, such as color management businesses and marketing specialists like brand developers. But with most suppliers, the objectives behind their predominantly portable products have been mainly the provision of color measuring capabilities for matching and the creation of color databases for the purpose of reference rather than analytics.

Through its eXact range, x-Rite has developed a portable spectrophotometer for use by printers and packaging converters anywhere in the pressroom. The device puts into the hands of press operators a means for accurate printing of both CMYK and spot colors.

A growing number of color companies have been expanding into ink formulation. Color Lab, part of Matthew International’s brand development business Schawk, develops brand colors for international companies with ink formulations to ensure consistent results from a range of printing processes and substrates.

In the highly competitive color management market, ink makers have been trying to differentiate themselves by centralizing their backup services in color so that they can provide their customers with 24/7 coverage across the world. They have also been extending technical advice to deal with end-to-end workflow and printing processes, sometimes by investing in demonstration and testing centers.

Flint Group’s Global Colour Centre (GCC), Lodz, Poland, serves customers in Europe and North and Latin America through a single database containing thousands of recipes for color matching and control in paper and board, flexible packaging and sheetfed offset. A specific focus of the database is to support the color demands of brand owners.

The company also has a global innovation center (GIC) for paper and board at Malmo, Sweden, which is a worldwide hub for product and print development, including bespoke customer projects. It includes a press for the demonstration and testing of innovations.

Siegwerk Druckfarben runs an on-site consulting service for printing customers in addition to its ink business.

“The core objective behind this service is to help printers to upgrade their workflow and their process performance,” explained Ralf Thuemler, global director, process management and consulting. “The advice we give extends beyond inks.”

“We have expertise in inks but we also have expertise in workflows in printing,” he added. “We have people who have worked in printing, packaging and workflow itself, so we have a team of specialists.”

The consulting service covers improvements resulting from automation, which can include the application of digitization equipment yielding large amounts of data. After analysis, this data can provide a basis for enhancing workflow processes for the printer by working out parameters of quality and performance.

“We have an agreement with our customers under which the data remains confidential to them,” said Thuemeler. “But we have the right to use it anonymously for benchmarking, which is important for our customers because it enables them to compare themselves with industry performance and for us to provide them with smart advice on ways in which process performances can be improved.”

Siegwerk believes that a competitive advantage of its consulting service compared to other advice businesses is its objectivity.

“Other services are being provided by companies which give advice about their own digitization and other technologies,” said Thuemler. “When we recommend equipment or digitization systems to our customers, we are independent of the suppliers. We are not working for any specific suppliers but developing customized solutions.”

The challenge ahead for ink producers, not only in the provision of advisory services but also in the marketing of their inks, will be how to deal with competition from companies able to exploit the advantages of big data.

One option for ink makers is to use their expert knowledge of inks and printing processes to develop specialist databases which, with the help of analytics, can give them strong niche positions in a data-driven market. But for many ink businesses, this will require a change in strategy to one in which the collection, processing and analysis of data becomes a priority. 

European Editor Sean Milmo is an Essex, UK-based writer specializing in coverage of the chemical industry.