中文Picture a folding carton flying through a factory with almost nobody touching it. That is not a far-future fantasy — Koenig & Bauer staged a version of it on 8 October at its Large Format End-to-End Executive Day in Radebeul, Germany, and the message was clear: the connected packaging plant is here, and it is quieter than you think.
The company gathered packaging executives from across Europe and walked them through a live production chain. The stars were the Rapida 145 large-format sheetfed offset press, the Ipress 145 PRO flatbed die-cutter, and the OMEGA Allpro 110 folder gluer — three machines that, together, take a blank sheet from printed board to finished carton with remarkably little human intervention.
The Rapida 145 alone is a beast, capable of 18,000 sheets per hour. But speed is the easy part. The interesting layer is the automation wrapped around it: AutoRun for autonomous job sequencing, AutoGuide for operator assistance, and QualiTronic inspection that monitors and documents print quality on the fly. InstrumentFlight speeds colour matching through gray-balance control. ErgoTronic FormCheck catches potential problems with coating plates and die-cutting forms before they ever reach downstream production. In plain terms: the machine is watching itself, and telling you about trouble before it becomes waste.
Why does this matter to a converter? Because the industry’s real headache is not speed. It is shorter runs, more frequent job changes, and growing demand for customised packaging. Every changeover is a chance to lose time and money. Koenig & Bauer’s answer is to let digital and conventional tech complement each other. The VariJET 106 digital folding-carton press handles ultra-short and medium runs that would be uneconomic on offset, freeing the big sheetfed presses to focus on volume. The result is a plant that flexes instead of fractures.
There was a human-shaped theme running through the day, too. The company showed its myKyana digital ecosystem, packaging workflow tech built with HYBRID Software, and a set of emerging no-code robotics applications. Visitors could poke at intuitive robotic controls under the banner “Robotics that just works.” The subtext is important: automation that needs a PhD to program won’t save a shop short on skilled labour. No-code robotics that a regular operator can set up might. With skilled labour scarce across the industry, that is less a luxury than a survival tool.
Koenig & Bauer also pushed its “protected at print” initiative — invisible security features baked into packaging during printing and finishing, verifiable through the ava smartphone app. For brand owners fighting counterfeits, that is a tangible value-add that travels all the way to the consumer’s phone.
Dietmar Heyduck, Senior VP of Sales for Paper & Packaging Sheetfed Systems, made the strategic point plainly: converters need solutions that address productivity, profitability, and operational complexity across the entire process, not just a faster press. The demonstrations reinforced that equipment, software, robotics, and quality systems have to coordinate — or the economics fall apart.
The bigger signal is where Koenig & Bauer is positioning itself. It is no longer just a machine builder; it is pitching integrated production systems and value-added services. For packaging converters, the takeaway is that the future belongs to shops that orchestrate their whole line — press, finishing, robotics, quality, and security — as one connected organism. The humans don’t disappear. They move from button-pushers to conductors.
Information source: INKISH.NEWS (inkish.news)
