Janine Schneider · Software Solutions Manager · Heidelberger Druckmaschinen · Shift

At the HEIDELBERG SHIFT event in Wiesloch, we met Janine Schneider inside the Home of Print — a place she knows very well. Before moving into product management for digital solutions, she was involved in customer presentations at the Home of Print, demonstrating how HEIDELBERG’s technologies work together from workflow to production.

Today, Janine is focused on Prinect, the workflow environment that connects HEIDELBERG’s different technologies and increasingly brings offset, digital, inkjet, finishing, and third-party equipment into one production ecosystem.

That integration becomes increasingly important as print runs get shorter and the number of jobs increases. A printing company may need to handle hundreds or even thousands of jobs every day, and without an intelligent workflow, the complexity quickly becomes impossible to manage efficiently. Prinect can route jobs automatically to the appropriate devices, including Versafire digital presses, with cloud-based and on-premise solutions working together to reduce manual intervention.

For Janine, workflow is increasingly becoming the real decision-maker in production. The press itself may be incredibly advanced, but it is the software that determines how efficiently work moves through the plant, which device receives each job, and how all the different technologies are connected.

Developing that workflow is far from simple. HEIDELBERG has to consider offset, toner, inkjet, flexo, inline and nearline finishing, third-party equipment, and very different customer production environments. Every new feature has to work within an increasingly complex ecosystem without creating new problems somewhere else.

That is why visiting customers remains so important. Janine recently met a commercial printer with a substantial offset operation who believes that within five to ten years, its commercial production could become entirely digital. Even for someone working closely with these trends every day, hearing a customer state that ambition so directly was surprising.

And this is where technologies such as Jetfire and Prinect become particularly interesting. For an existing HEIDELBERG offset customer, adding digital production does not necessarily mean creating another separate production island. The ambition is to build one integrated ecosystem where offset and digital can be managed through the same workflow.

The next major step is already coming: Prinect Touch Free will expand further, with offset becoming part of the automated production environment as HEIDELBERG continues toward increasingly autonomous print production.