Printing Awards 2022: bel wins the Gold award for Overprint’s Control Center

bel wins the Gold award in its category in the Printing Awards 2022 organized by Boussias Communications for the second time in Greece. Leading representatives of the printing & packaging industry gathered in the awards ceremony which took place on Wednesday, December 1st at the Radisson Blu Park hotel in Athens. Specifically, bel received the Gold award for the integrated solution of Overprint’s Control Center in the category Production management systems and quality control in printing.

“It is a great honor and pleasure to win the Gold Award for Control Center at the Printing Awards. The award seals our strength in the market and the achievement of our goals, utilizing data from the entire production workflow, automating processes, and connecting people and equipment. The awarding to Overprint MIS shows the recognition of the efforts of all our people and the way in which bel envisions the development of its products around the 3 pillars: digitization, automation, connectivity. The Printing Awards is an important establishment which provides a platform for the promotion of innovative and successful projects. Our customers are the ones who inspire us and drive us every day to aim higher,” says Konstantinos Spyropoulos, Global Sales & Business Development Director of bel.

Having acknowledged the challenges faced by its customers, bel has listed some of their requirements, as follows: comparing cost estimation calculations versus actual production costs of job orders, accurate and on-time information on production times (and therefore costs) data, elimination of errors arising from manual data entries either due to incorrect quantities (e.g. consumption of print materials) or incorrect entries (on start/end times, job set-up /production, stoppages, reasons of stoppages e.g. due to maintenance, breakdowns, lunch breaks, etc.)

Therefore, it identified the need to automate communication and data logging throughout all production stages, which will be able to provide the system with data and information in an automated and reliable manner.

The solution to this was given by Overprint Control Center, an integrated system for the automated collection and processing of production data through the integration of PLCs on production equipment (printing machines, cutting systems, folders, gluers, etc.) regardless of type and manufacturer.

The PLCs monitor on-line and continuously record all critical parameters of the production process, to achieve real-time monitoring, such as:

  • Start time, end time and duration of production stages
  • Start time, end time and duration of equipment set-up stages
  • Average operating speed of equipment
  • Equipment status (set-up, operation, stoppages)
  • Start time, end time and duration of equipment stoppages
  • Consumed and produced quantities

eliminating the need for manual data entries and thus eliminating human errors.

Nowadays, there is a newly established environment where digitization, automation, and connectivity play an important role in today’s value chain. Overprint MIS and the aforementioned Overprint Control Center automation solution have been developed and designed upon the principles of the 3 pillars of our vision of The Connected Converter which are: Digitization – Automation – Connectivity.

The main outcomes that derive out of the benefits of the automated communication and data logging throughout all production stages are increased production efficiency and profitability, competitive agility, and improved ability to serve customers.

The integrated automation solution for data entry, Overprint Control Center, with the integration of PLCs and their connection to the Overprint MIS system has been successfully installed in printers & converters in Greece, Turkey, Poland.