NELA as partner at Heidelberg's "Showtime"-Event

As one of the first face-to-face events of the current year, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG hosted the Showtime event in its newly designed Print Media Center from June 23 to 25, 2021. Customers and interested parties could gain organized insights into the latest solutions for everything to do with industrialized commercial printing, packaging printing, label printing and all-round commercial printing. NELA was also invited as a long-term partner for Heidelberg's prepress solutions.

For several years now, two fully automatic NELA bending systems, each installed in-line with a Heidelberg Suprasetter, have been producing printing plates for the live demos in the PMC. "Showtime" was about fully autonomous production in highly industrialized printing companies, the focus here is on Heidelberg's Plate to Unit system. With the automated loading and unloading of the printing plates, plate changes are carried out much faster and the utilization of the printing press increases. While one signature is being printed, printing plates for the next one can be made available directly at the printing press.

A prerequisite for the functioning of this efficient system is the correct pre-sorting of the printing plates so that the correct plate is inserted in each inking unit. The plates have to be put in the correct order into the transport cassette - and NELA takes care of that with its intelligent plate sorter. A newly developed interface to Plate Pilot / Prinect guarantees the flow of information to the NELA system, which identifies each plate via barcode information and receives information about which print job a plate belongs to. Thus the system can store it in the corresponding cassette in the plate sorter.

NELA's sorting solutions met with broad interest from the packaging and commercial printing sectors. The “Packaging” tour also provided information about the fully automatic bending and sorting of printing plates. We would like to thank our partner Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG very much for the opportunity to present ourselves personally at the “Showtime” event.

Images: The NELA SF-Bender with plate sorter produces printing plates for the demo machines in Heidelberg's Print Media Center.