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Star product

Heidelberg Prinect Touch Free

‘Revolutionary’ workflow development promised, says Simon Eccles

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 plat-
What does it do? tomer and press event at its German HQ in form work, and so Heidelberg is starting
All through 2024 Heidelberg has been October (Printweek: www.bit. again but with different ambitions.
dropping hints about a forthcoming work- ly/3Vktn2K). However Printweek’s report According to Zöller: “We could have used
flow automation product that it predicts was a bit too optimistic about availability, as Zaikio technology, but it became clear a
will be revolutionary, except you won’t be Specifications we got the impression that there was
able to buy it for another year. already a user site. year ago that it was not going to succeed
It’s called Prinect Touch Free, and prom- Not quite out of the Axel Zöller, head of product manage- with the connectivity.”
ises cloud-based and completely hands-off development ment for Prinect, now says that what he He admits that the initial development
job scheduling that intelligently deter- phase, Heidelberg’s calls a ‘concept’ site at a so-far unnamed versions of Prinect Touch Free will use
mines the best production path at any given latest workflow printer in Holland will start in January. some Zaikio technology to get up and run-
time and can react instantly and automati- tool is intended to Heidelberg hopes to be demonstrating ning, but says this will be phased out before
cally to any changes. It will work with drive workflow results by next summer, with a view to
optimisation and
Heidelberg’s range, plus very many third helps reaffirm the releasing initial versions to users at the end the commercial release.
party products that it has already written manufacturer’s of 2025. Zöller expects “full functionality in
links to for its Prinect Production Manager commitment to the later part of 2026.” How will it work
workflow. digital print tech. Initially the system will only work with Zöller says that most of today’s main pro-
It’s a part of Heidelberg’s goal of fully Heidelberg’s digital presses, the Ricoh- duction workflow networks – citing Kodak
automated print production, end-to-end based Versafire toner presses and the forth-
from order receipt to despatch. Driving fac- coming Canon-based Jetfire 50 and 75 Prinergy, Agfa Apogee and Screen
tors are Heidelberg’s analysis of the effects sheetfed inkjets. However, it will progres- Trueflow – were originally developed in the
of smaller but more numerous print runs sively be rolled out to work with late 1990s or early 2000s. Technology and
that mean minimising touchpoints for effi- Heidelberg’s litho range, and to a large business needs have moved on, and in par-
ciency, with the need for ever more sophis- range of third-party MIS and production ticular there’s a need for more automation
ticated automation, including the catch-all machinery. Zöller says that this should hap- with fewer touchpoints.
AI, to compensate for both pressurised pen quickly, as Heidelberg already has
margins and the much-discussed skills Prinect links to about 1,500 third-party sys- According to Zöller, the “revolutionary”
shortage and recruitment challenge tems. part is because “Prinect Touch Free is
throughout the industry. With Heidelberg’s “We don’t usually announce so early,” totally different, in that we do not provide
on-off embrace of digital presses being says Zöller. “But this is so different that we tools any more. It analyses a job, the meta-
firmly on again, it’s also talking about want to talk about it.” It’s been in develop- data, etc, and it knows all the production
hybrid digital-litho production. ment for three years, but he says
Heidelberg first mentioned Prinect Heidelberg wanted to give the market an equipment available. Our software defines
Touch Free in its Drupa press conferences, idea of what was coming, so it could consult the most effective method of production
but went into a bit more detail in a cus- with potential users about their needs. It that keeps to the delivery date.”
“The ‘revolutionary’ part is because “Prinect Touch Free is totally different.”

30 PrintWeek MENA February 2025 www.printweekmena.com