Drupa 2024, held from May-28 to June-07, 2024 had diverse opinions. These varied perspectives are a major departure from the unanimously positive reviews seen in previous drupa editions up to 2016.

Earlier, drupa expositions were celebrated for their record-breaking attendance, numerous exhibitors, new deals, and cutting-edge innovations. This year, however, the tone was more subdued and the crowds thinner. Many people felt that drupa, usually known for innovation in technologies and solutions, was missing this aspect this year. OEM manufacturers from India were happy with the enhanced visibility and more interest in their products.

The overwhelming general view of the exhibitors was that this year’s drupa was defined by “quality over quantity.” The keen interest and serious intent of the visitors made up for the lack of numbers.

The key themes that stood out at the event were automation, integration, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and sustainability.

Automation: Significant enhancements were demonstrated in setting up offset print jobs. Unmanned setups of multiple jobs printed on different sheet sizes of varying colors and coatings seamlessly streamlined without human intervention. Cleaning the printing units for changeover of jobs and colors that primarily involves roller wash at much faster pace. A complete changeover of job on six color unit with coater is accomplished in about ten minutes. Loading of piles of different sheet sizes is total automated. CIP4 has matured and stabilized enabling enhanced printing automation.

Makeready time has dramatically reduced for folder gluers. Feeding is more precise eliminating feeding of double folding carton.

On Sustainability, a significant development was introduction of polymer free foil used in embellishment. Both foils and laminations films are more sustainable.

Prepress workflow automation, Print MIS / ERP are matured and stable solutions. These solutions are migrating from servers on premise to Cloud.

Notable Development: Transparent conductive materials for circuit printing by flexography, was notable development. Smart packaging products was possible only by Screen printing. Flexography will drastically enhance productivity of smart packaging products, enabling high volume production in shorter time.

AI and Imposition: The Case for Hand-Coded Logic

Imposition and layout planning tasks demand precision, consistency, and repeatability. While GPTs excel at creative tasks, they often fall short in tasks requiring high accuracy.

In contrast, InSoft Automation’s methodology, honed over a decade, relies on hand-coded logic that has proven dependable for dynamic, cost-based imposition and ganging. This approach ensures reliability and precision, key components for successful imposition tasks.

Beware of technologies that claim to apply AI in this domain!

InSoft made the strategic decision to skip drupa 2024 well in advance of the event. Being a pure-play software development company, we felt eleven days spent at the exposition would be too long. The scale of drupa requires significant human resource. Further, waiting for four years to unveil innovations doesn’t align with our agile approach to development.

At InSoft, the focus remains steadfast on innovation aimed at automation and optimization, with a view to enhancing our clients’ bottom lines. Our team, primarily comprising programmers, testers, and support engineers, is dedicated to simplify complexity using sophisticated mathematical techniques to enhance efficiency in a given setup.

Over the past twelve months, InSoft has introduced a few groundbreaking features. Our new ganging methodology, “No Mix Gang”, allows for the ganging of different jobs that were prohibited to place on the same sheet for various reasons earlier. Novel ganging algorithms were developed specifically for short run label SKUs. Major enhancements were made in Book-of-One segment, allowing workflow to be set with ease for completely unmanned imposition. Improved automation in ganging for the lesser-known segment FORMS-printing eliminates human intervention.

InSoft’s work-from-home strategy, implemented since 2013, has been highly rewarding; during drupa, many customers approached us online, took demos, and closed couple of orders. We had many enquiries from visitors at drupa, who evaluated and compared our solutions with some other they saw at the show resulting in several leads. Drupa 2024 was, in its own way, helpful for us.

Print industry is wondering about the next edition of this biggest global print event. The duration of the event was shortened from 14 to 11 days in 2016, a move that was welcomed by all. More dramatic changes and innovations in organizing this event are anticipated to keep the biggest carnival of print exciting for both visitors and exhibitors.

Sam Mulay
VP Business Development
InSoft Automation