中文Every step of a packaging operation produces data: the estimate, the quote, the run itself, quality checks, delivery. Most of it goes uncaptured, and what is captured rarely reaches the person who can act on it while the job is still on the floor. ePS has released CommandCore 2026.3, a major platform update built to close that gap by providing more sellable capacity from existing plant resources and putting the information a plant is already generating to use. It is the latest example of print software moving from recording work to actively helping run it.
“Most packaging manufacturers are sitting on more data than they have ever had, and less time than ever to look at it,” said Craig Tait, chief product officer at ePS. “The question we asked with 2026.3 wasn’t how to collect more data. It was how to put what we already collect in front of the person who can act on it, before the job is finished.” That reframing – act, not archive – is the throughline of the release, and it is the right problem to attack given how much instrumentation already exists on a modern press.
The foundation of the release is PackAI, ePS’s AI-powered business-intelligence solution, embedded in Radius and built specifically for packaging rather than adapted from a generic platform. It is a standalone solution complete with the dashboards a packaging plant needs, so no third-party BI tool is required to get started. A user describes the dashboard they need in plain language, reviews the query and charts PackAI proposes, and refines them in the same conversation before publishing. Users ask questions directly and get answers the same way – no SQL, no BI training, no waiting on a report queue. Underneath sits a new centralized data model, one governed source for the operational and business information the platform already holds, so decisions rest on one trusted set of numbers rather than two reports that disagree.
AC4D brings the machine’s own data onto the floor. Machine Maintenance gives each plant a page in Plant Manager to set up and track planned maintenance machine by machine, with a month calendar and an overdue count no filter can hide, sitting alongside the run and downtime data reviewed daily. Above the machine, a large-format display shows a Performance Dashboard: machine state, the reason for any stoppage, progress against target speed, shift totals and the next three jobs, readable from across the floor. Work that slips becomes visible before it becomes a stoppage, and a run drifting below target is caught and corrected during the shift rather than explained after.
PrintFlow 4D introduces Capacity Management, turning the schedule a plant already maintains into a picture it can read. A colour-coded grid shows how loaded each machine, group or plant is across days, weeks and months, with the hours behind every number and a drill-down to the jobs driving the load. Capacity can be reserved to protect committed work, and schedulers see where the plant is tight, free or overbooked at a glance rather than reading the Gantt job by job, so load is rebalanced before it turns into a late order and idle capacity becomes visible enough to sell.
Two changes take the corrugator off its fixed screens. CorrTrim arrives as a browser-based application, delivering identical results to the desktop version from a trim engine re-engineered to run up to 10 times faster, so a planner can iterate on a trim rather than accept the first workable answer – which is where better board utilization comes from. Escada Syncro adds a mobile-format view of the corrugator to any phone or tablet on the plant network, covering live shift and machine status, the order queue and current alarms; the view is read-only by design, so nothing on the corrugator can be started, stopped or adjusted from a phone.
A new REST API opens Metrics ERP to standard integration work and carries the first direct integration between Metrics ERP and PrintFlow 4D, so jobs and production records pass across, the finite-capacity schedule returns, and job tracking flows back from the shop floor. Purchasing tasks and approvals also move to the browser, so an order is not stuck waiting for an approver at their desk.
CommandCore 2026.3 is available now. For packaging manufacturers, the pitch is that the data to recover capacity is already being produced; the work is to surface it in time to act. ePS’s release is a clear marker that packaging MIS is becoming a real-time control layer rather than a post-shift ledger.
Source: Specialist Printing Worldwide – “ePS Launches CommandCore 2026.3: Turning Plant Data into Sellable Capacity” (30 September 2026).
The release’s real innovation is not more data but surfaced, actionable data: a dashboard a supervisor reads across the floor, a capacity grid a scheduler rebalances before a late order, and a browser corrugator planner who iterates instead of accepting the first trim. That is MIS becoming a control layer.
