HP Inc. has unveiled new ways for print service providers to grow their digital-based business and put Industry 4.0 into practice by enabling better automated tools to enhance connectivity, productivity and support customer growth as print service providers move to capture online business.  

"We are seeing strong customer momentum in the past year alongside industry challenges created by the pandemic, with Industry 4.0 being a driving force of growth for Indigo customers who have embraced high-automation practices and adopt e-commerce-driven web-to-print business practices," said Haim Levit, vice president and general manager, HP Indigo. 

HP attributes part of this momentum in particular, from continued strong growth in labels and packaging direct print volume growing 36% over 2019 levels and the commercial sector's continued recovery from pandemic headwinds.

PrintOS Site Flow, an end-to-end production management solution for achieving zero-touch automation, has fueled an explosive growth in customer order traffic through 2021. Connecting to more than 600 brands globally, HP customers tapped into myriad of online order systems and e-commerce platforms. With Site Flow, each PSP automatically receives, produces and ships an unlimited number of jobs per day. Site Flow reduces bottlenecks, touchpoints and labor dollars, while being device and product independent; many of the core principles on which Industry 4.0 was built on.   

Hundreds of PSPs are operating Site Flow daily, which saw a 65% increase in job traffic in 2021. More than 460 million items were processed through the secure online platform, operating in 45 countries to deliver print products such as photo books, calendars, invitations and greeting cards.

"COVID-19 put a lot of power into the consumers' hands, and our goal was to be the premier B2C print fulfilment supplier in Canada,” said Todd Cober, president, Cober Solutions. "An integral part of this is our ability to integrate our internal systems with our B2C partners as quickly and efficiently as possible. Using Site Flow helps to reduce the roadblocks altogether and enabled us to easily onboard new brands and grow our business."

"We use Site Flow to produce work for brands that generate 2,000 to 3,000 unique orders per day during peak season," said Bill Duerr, president, Hatteras. "There is a great team at Hatteras, but labor shortages are real today. With Site Flow, I can give my press room manager the tools he needs to maximize the productivity of the good people we have."

Industry 4.0 practices are allowing HP Indigo print service providers to deliver thousands of digital print jobs every day. As a result, HP continues to invest and expand business possibilities for PSPs.

HP announced the PrintOS Integration Hub, a portal where HP provides technical information on how to integrate with HP Indigo devices and solutions, and achieve automation across vendor solutions. Due to the upswing in e-commerce orders, printers need to increase automation through multiple systems, spanning from submission, printing, finishing and fulfillment solutions, through to shipping and tracking.

"Automation is the only way to consistently deliver high volumes of short run jobs while meeting customers' quality and schedule expectations," said Gershon Alon, head of HP Indigo solutions, HP. "Customers are struggling to hire and maintain skilled personnel. Cross-vendor automation increases employees' efficiency and enables the production of much more work with existing staff and resources."

An example of cross-vendor automation is the improved integration between the PrintOS Production Pro DFE for Commercial Print and Heidelberg Prinect, which automates production and avoids human errors. Customers can now maintain a unified automated workflow, for both their analogue jobs and their digital Indigo press jobs, and manage them from their Heidelberg MIS.

"The enhanced connectivity between Heidelberg Prinect and HP Indigo presses enables Heidelberg customers to integrate the Prinect Business Manager (MIS), the offset prepress capabilities and digital presses into one workflow," said Christopher Berti, vice president of product management, Prinect. "That brings the benefits of higher efficiency, fully leveraging the original investment (e.g., offset prepress system), and the flexibility of using the same workflow for both worlds: offset and digital printing. It helps close a major gap on the road to printshops achieving end-to-end integration."

"The Prinect integration with Indigo digital presses enables a single data entry point via JD", reduces touch points and therefore human errors," said Liesbeth Van Assche, process architect, Artoos Group. “We send our jobs from Prinect to the HP Indigo digital press and our press operator does not deal with any job parameter settings, file preparation, imposition or proofing. Press operators are 100% focused on printing the job and insuring the quality of the job."

Automating color is also a key focus area for HP Indigo. On top of the already-supported Idealliance G7 color certification, PrintOS Color Beat now also automates Fogra color certification for new-generation HP Indigo commercial and labels-and-packaging presses including the HP indigo 100K, HP Indigo 15K, HP Indigo 12000 VP, HP Indigo 25K and HP Indigo 35K.

The FograCert PSD Colour Data allows print service providers to get a fully automated verification to the most widely used Fogra color standards requested by print buyers and brands, validating that the press meets the highest color standards. With a touch of a button.  The compliance of a given print job is certified against Fogra PSD, ProcessStandard Digital (ISO/TS 15311-2) and can be easily communicated with the print buyer, the brand or the QA team.

Automatic Alert Agent 2.0 for HP Indigo Series 4 digital presses (HP Indigo 12000 and 15K). This inline inspection system scans every printed sheet and compares it to its digital print file, automatically identifying possible print defects. AAA 2.0 now automatically diverts defective sheets to scrap and reprints them, all in real time with no human intervention, and no interruption to production. The system leverages advanced Industry 4.0 artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) algorithms, increasing accuracy and speed, to provide productivity and profitability for PSPs.