SCREEN + LabelHub — The Press Is Only Part of the Story · Charlie Brown & Peter Vogt
Buying a digital press used to be mostly about speed, resolution, quality, and productivity.
That is changing.
At Labelexpo Americas in Chicago, Morten B. Reitoft meets Charlie from SCREEN and Peter from LabelHub to talk about something increasingly important in label production: the entire workflow surrounding the press.
Both come with years of hands-on experience from production environments. Charlie spent more than three decades in printing before moving to SCREEN, while Peter worked for 20 years as an IT manager at a Danish label-converting company before founding LabelHub.
And that experience matters.
SCREEN continues to develop its digital label portfolio, including wider and increasingly productive presses, but Charlie explains that customers today are looking at much more than specifications alone. They want to understand how orders enter the company, how files are prepared, how production is automated, how presses connect with finishing, and how errors can be removed before they become expensive.
That is where LabelHub fits in.
LabelHub integrates with established MIS platforms and combines production data with PDF files, simplifying ordering, reordering, and, increasingly, prepress processes in the cloud. The objective is straightforward: remove unnecessary complexity and make it easier for both converters and their customers to move work through the production process.
And catching mistakes early matters.
As Charlie puts it, the closer an error gets to the press, the more expensive it becomes to fix. Better upstream automation can save materials, labor, production time, and downstream capacity.
For SCREEN, partnerships with companies such as LabelHub — together with finishing partners — make it possible to demonstrate something much broader than a printing engine. Even within a relatively compact exhibition booth, customers can see a complete label production environment from order and prepress through printing, finishing, and final product.
For LabelHub, the journey has also changed significantly. Eight years ago, the company was still demonstrating concepts with PowerPoint because the software wasn’t ready to be trusted live. Today, major customers run production through the platform, and prepress has become one of its fastest-growing areas.
In this INKISH film, we talk about digital label production, workflow automation, MIS integration, cloud-based prepress, partnerships, and why selling a press today increasingly means being able to show the complete production ecosystem.
Because the press may still be at the center of production.
But it is no longer the whole story.
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Wed September 16th
Grand Rapids Label — 142 Years Old, Still L...
Grand Rapids Label has been in business for 142 years. That means the company has obviously done quite a few things right. But for President Bill, respecting that history doesn't mean protecting everything the company has always done. It means understanding what made Grand Rapids Label successful — while continuously challenging how the business can become better. Bill became the first president from outside the founding family just three years ago, and today he is helping prepare Grand Rapids Label for its next chapter, where data, automation, digital production, AI, and increasingly sophisticated software become important tools alongside the knowledge and experience of its people. One of those investments is CERM. And the road to CERM wasn't completely straightforward. Grand Rapids Label had previously selected another major MIS platform, but during implementation the management team came to a difficult conclusion: it wasn't the right solution. So they stopped. Starting again wasn't easy, but the experience also gave the company a much clearer understanding of what it actually needed from an MIS partner. With CERM, Grand Rapids Label took a phased approach. First, focus on what absolutely has to work. Then build from there. That is particularly important for a company heavily involved in automotive and direct food-contact applications, where regulations, certifications, traceability, supply chains, and customer requirements leave little room for disruption. Today, CERM is becoming much more than an administrative system. Combined with Power BI and production technology, the data is being used by cross-functional teams throughout Grand Rapids Label to continuously identify opportunities for improvement — whether that means reducing order-entry time, improving estimating, optimizing press utilization, or finding smarter ways of producing work. Those teams meet every week. The objective isn't simply to collect more data. It is to turn data into better decisions. And Bill sees another important consequence: good data can allow management to decentralize decision-making. Give people trustworthy information, establish the right guardrails, and employees can make more decisions themselves without being micromanaged. That also changes how the ROI of an MIS should be considered. Unlike a printing press, where productivity and return can often be calculated relatively directly, the value of an MIS appears throughout the organization — in faster processes, better costing, higher utilization, improved profitability, stronger decision-making, and ultimately in the culture of the company. In this INKISH film, Morten B. Reitoft talks with Bill about 142 years of Grand Rapids Label, becoming the company's first president from outside the family, lessons from an MIS implementation that didn't work, the move to CERM, Power BI, continuous improvement, AI, and why technology should ultimately give people more freedom to make better decisions. Because staying successful for 142 years doesn't mean doing things the same way for 142 years.