Heidelberg announced the motto ‘Simply Smart’ during Drupa 2016 as the company’s response to the challenges and opportunities associated with Print 4.0. Heidelberg is offering customer-specific benefits and making it as easy as possible to work with increasingly complex processes and technologies.

“For Heidelberg, Simply Smart is more than just a motto. It is the principle we apply to the development of solutions designed to make handling processes and technologies as easy as possible. It is how we imagine the intelligent, highly automated print shop of the future,” said Rene Ludvigsen, Regional Head of Heidelberg Asia.

Besides ‘Simply Smart’, during Print China, Heidelberg will put forward several other new concepts — ‘Smart Print Shop’, ‘Smart Services’ and ‘Smart Collaboration’.

Smart Print Shop is Heidelberg’s vision of the digitised, integrated and networked print shop. All these are attributed to the Prinect workflow, which integrates all areas and lays the foundation for integrated communication inside the print shop, as well as between the print shop and their customers and suppliers.

Smart Services safeguard the smooth running of a print shop round the clock. Heidelberg service offerings and consumables enable customers to boost their machine availability and productivity. Thanks to ‘Smart Services’, customers can get technical support fast, get problem solved in an efficient way, even before it causes a machine stoppage, and get parts replaced in good time during a scheduled service.

‘Smart collaboration’ stands for innovative approaches to cooperation. New digital approaches are developed as part of the collaboration between Heidelberg and customers. The use of eCommerce is an example - through the new Heidelberg China Online Shop. In a further step, customers will be able to log into the Heidelberg website to obtain a detailed breakdown of how their machines are performing.

‘Navigated Printing’ aims to increase the net productivity of print shops. As a pioneer of the digitisation of the Printing industry, Heidelberg will highlight its ‘Navigated Printing’ philosophy at China Print 2017.

Since Drupa 2016, Heidelberg has been ushering in a paradigm shift with its new ‘Push to Stop’ operating philosophy. The operator only interrupts the printing process when necessary or not at all. This raises the effectiveness of print production to previously unattainable levels, enables better planning of processes, and continuous process monitoring lowers the error rate.

“The focus is no longer simply on equipment, but far more on the integrated overall process and all the requisite components. What benefits we offer our customers are always our key consideration, because our own success depends on that of our customers,” said Benny Huang Head of Heidelberg China. “Our customers expect us to deliver added value and enhanced business opportunities, and we are actively helping them make the transformation to a digitised future. ‘Simply Smart’ will certainly become a signpost for the future of our industry.”