Dr. Adrian Steele · Managing Director · Mercian Labels · LabelExpo Barcelona 2025
Pat McGrew from Inkish interviews Dr. Adrien Steel, Managing Director of Mercian Labels, at LabelExpo 2025 in Barcelona, about how CERM has been central to the company’s drive for efficiency and growth. Adrien explains that CERM has become the “point of truth” for Mercian’s entire production platform, integrating all their hardware and software systems into a single cohesive workflow. They adopted CERM in 2016 and, after an initial implementation phase, have continually built deeper integrations over time.
He highlights their biggest productivity leap: integrating CERM with ABG’s Connect platform to automate the conversion of short-run digital labels into finished rolls—traditionally one of the biggest bottlenecks. This project, launched in 2019 and fully operational from 2022, won a global label industry award and has delivered major results: a 9% improvement in turnover per employee in 2023, followed by another 13% in 2024. Adrien notes that this automation not only boosts efficiency but also builds customer trust by improving delivery reliability and product quality, which in turn strengthens sales and retention.
He adds that productivity gains have continued despite tough market conditions across Europe, and that profitability has grown as a result. Looking ahead, Mercian is now exploring ways to integrate AI into order processing. Adrien also discusses the cultural side: staff at Mercian expect continual change as part of the company’s drive to be a world-class label manufacturer, and seeing ongoing improvements motivates them. Rather than resisting new tools, employees embrace them as part of their culture—so much so that stopping innovation would unsettle them.
Adrien concludes that embracing change, automation, and innovation through platforms like CERM has made Mercian more competitive and secure and has helped build a high-performing, future-ready team.
Thu September 18th
Julie Watson · CEO · Ultimate Tech · Lab...
Julie explains that Ultimate has been investing heavily in R&D over the past few years, expanding its solutions beyond commercial print into new segments such as labels, digital packaging, and wide format. The company’s goal is to eliminate manual prepress work by enabling full hands-free automation from web storefronts or MIS systems through to printing and finishing. At the booth, they are demonstrating automated label production with an HP Indigo press and a GM LC350 laser die-cutter, showing how their software dynamically handles mixed jobs, different shapes, sizes, barcodes, and changeovers all on a single roll. Julie notes that digital printing is changing the market by enabling shorter runs, personalization, and mass customization, while also creating complexity from managing many SKUs and batches—something Ultimate’s solutions can fully automate. The system can even manage extended content labels such as pharmaceutical booklets and handle batching and separation for multi-customer rolls directly from CSV or MIS data, with no manual touch points. She highlights Ultimate’s unique strength in centralizing workflows: instead of separate imposition software tied to each device, Ultimate offers a unified platform that can drive diverse applications—commercial, mailing, books, labels, and wide format—through a single pipeline. This reduces training and maintenance complexity while improving scalability. Julie adds that while many customers still run Ultimate on-premise, the software can also run in the cloud, on Windows, Mac, or Linux servers, and can dynamically scale for peak seasons. This flexibility allows customers to start small, expand capacity when needed, and process maximum volumes during high-demand periods. She concludes that this approach helps converters accept more orders, shorten turnaround times, and boost revenue during peak seasons.