Konica Minolta supports its customers with a systematic approach on their way to Industry 5.0. The mission of the Konica Minolta team is to listen to printing companies, define their status quo and find out how they can connect in the next few years and where they want to be in five to ten years. We want to be there as a partner to help our customers achieve that goal. We focus on our customers' manufacturing strategies to ensure efficient and sustainable production capacity and to enable resilience and growth for our customers. Our focus is therefore no longer on what Konica Minolta can do as a print technology provider. We are focused on being a partner to print businesses at all levels, and on moving with you on the road to Industry 5.0.
Open standards and automated workflows
Konica Minolta is therefore working to establish a systematic, strategic and standardised structure as a basis for implementing processes and open technology. In short, the printing industry needs an ecosystem that is open to more applications - much like Android is open to apps inthe smartphone world. This is why Konica Minolta, unlike other printing companies, is committed to open standards and APIs.
Printing today means so much more than just buying a new machine. It's about processes along the entire production chain, from prepress to postpress, as well as back office, sales, and accessories. We used to think in terms of printed sheets. Today we think in terms of finished products, die-cut, gold-plated, assembled and delivered within the shortest possible time.
Open ecosystems for letterpress and label-on-Demand-Print
Moving a printing company towards Industry 5.0 is not easy - especially in an industry that is used to closed systems. But to meet the challenges of our time, the platform idea is the right solution.
This is why Konica Minolta brings together existing partners who have more than 15 years of extensive expertise in both prepress and postpress. We draw on partners with many years of knowledge and bring them together with Konica Minolta as a general contractor to create a package of different solutions that work hand in hand. For printing companies, this means a long-term partnership and custom-fit approaches for the path to Industry 5.0.
To do this, Konica Minolta is thinking about different ecosystems - for labels, for book publishers and Books on Demand, for Label on Demand and for packaging that support an efficient end-to-end approach.
Motivating and retaining employees
But the end-to-end approach doesn't just promote efficiency. New workflows also help with staff shortages. Many printing companies have neglected people with talent and given them manual, repetitive, almost boring tasks. As a result, qualified people are becoming harder to keep. Employee loyalty is dwindling - as a result there is massive job hopping in the print market.
In addition, COVID-19 has made people more aware of the importance of work-life balance. The entire print industry therefore needs to make work more interesting and creative again and encourage collaboration to attract talent to the print business and consider the human factor on both the PP and IP sides. Artificial intelligence, IoT sensors and robotics mean that industrial processes can be made even more efficient. In the process, the role of humans will also change, moving away from routine work towards more complex tasks such as programming and monitoring technologies. This is exactly what Industry 5.0 does.