To push ahead with their digitalization offensive, the supervisory board of Koenig & Bauer AG has appointed Ralf Sammeck, executive board member for the Sheetfed segment, to take over the group-wide coordination of the digital transformation, in addition to his existing duties.
Sammeck has been a full member of the Koenig & Bauer AG executive board since 2007 with responsibility for sales, marketing and service of sheetfed presses manufactured in Radebeul. It is here that the digital activities of the printing press manufacturer originated. Since 1995, Koenig & Bauer has been able to evaluate press data and provide services based on this data. This division has since achieved IoT structures, built up big data competence and, under the leadership of Ralf Sammeck, has undoubtedly developed into a think tank for the digitalization of business processes.
Automation, inline quality regulation and control, makeready time reduction, waste reduction, closed-loop processes, data-based services, performance reports and benchmarking – all of these were preliminary steps for autonomous printing (AutoRun), with which Koenig & Bauer introduced the next stage of process automation for industrial print production in 2018. The Rapida LiveApp (for which Koenig & Bauer received the German Design Award 2018) can be used to control and monitor presses, record batches and consumables, assign them to the relevant print job, manage the warehouse and automatically trigger ordering processes. Based on the remote platforms, the performance data of the presses and their log files, services such as predictive maintenance have been developed, which can detect early on whether a press component is in danger of failing. Koenig & Bauer in Radebeul uses algorithms and artificial intelligence and combines knowledge from data science with the expertise of service technicians and engineers.
