CARSTEN KNUDSEN WILL be enjoying a slight respite in the headlong development of EskoArtwork, the company he heads as ceo; for in July, the final line was drawn under the merger of Esko Graphics and Artwork Systems to create EskoArtwork, a supplier of software and hardware with a leading position in packaging prepress. That the company also has strong positions in commercial printing through its Neo Rip, Odystar workflow and Enfocus operations also keeps the company busy; but it is from the packaging side that EskoArtwork draws its strength.

As well as the integration of the two companies at the legal level, the integration of the software platforms has been completed, so that by Drupa Knudsen could point to a stand where every application could communicate with every other on view and many beyond, owing to a list of partnership deals that underline the company’s leadership position. These include HP, Xerox, DuPont, Sun Chemicals, ExxonMobil, Presstek and a host of others across the industry’s spectrum. The Belgian business operates in exalted company.

Getting to this point has been a bumpy road: first, Danish prepress vendors Purup and Eskofot came together followed by merger with Barco Systems out of Ghent in Belgium. Consolidation of platesetter lines followed and then the decision to curtail any interests in exposing litho plates, including a development project into imaging conventional plates and the sale of its successful DPX systems to ECRM.

Now the EskoArtwork business is largely software, but with important sidelines in platesetters for flexo plates and in Kongsberg, which produces cutting tables for cutting packaging blanks and also finds a lease of life in large format display print, where the highly accurate flatbed cutting plotters are used to produce free-standing display units.

However, packaging will remain the mainstay of the business. It is a sector that the company has been involved in for more than three decades and one where it has expanded its interests well beyond prepress production into project management, business integration and 3D design. This experience provides its own protection against the ambitions of newcomers to the sector and is why so many companies are continuing to want to work with EskoArtwork. “Agfa, Kodak and Heidelberg are excellent companies with excellent reputations and have excellent offerings in the commercial print market, but I’m not sure that they have good products yet for the packaging market,” says Knudsen. “We have been in the market for 35 years and have learned a little about it in that time, and as a result we have a very solid reputation. It is going to take time for our competitors to catch up.”

What they have to catch up with is an approach which is taking EskoArtwork well beyond prepress, up into design in one direction, and into materials science in the other.

In the design area, the company is able to offer seamless integration with 3D engineering tools that wrap a package around the CAD design of a product that has not moved beyond the prototype stage into final production – with dynamic content management, for example, which ensures that when a change is made to the wording on a list of ingredients, all the artwork is updated so that only an unmistakable master exists. “We can have a graphic rendering of a product placed on a retail shelf through to the delivery of a final file. It has taken out a lot of the manual processes,” he explains.

This is about up and down integration of what have been discreet stages in the production cycle. The result is fewer errors and misunderstandings and a faster-to-market product development, which is what fast moving consumer goods companies are looking for. “We are at the stage in the industry where there are now islands of automation,” Knudsen continues. “We have options for interfaces between these islands to allow customers to become more efficient.

“We are also starting to see proprietary systems go away in favour of those built on standards. Apart from anything else, this makes maintenance costs lower and integration with MIS smoother. To date we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.”

One example is at Limmatdruck, a Swiss packaging company where, using JDF, there is integration in one direction with an SAP business process system and in the other with Manroland presses and Bobst carton gluers. The result has been faster-to-market production for retailer Migros, which owns the print operation. Automation, he points out, first emerged around 25 years ago. Now end-to-end automation is fast becoming the reality, he explains: “Companies are probably doing OK in their day-to-day business, but if they look in the mirror they know they have to change.”

This is a further reason for the host of companies that are now talking to EskoArtwork. In commercial print, where doubts had been raised about the company’s long-term commitment to the sector, there is the deal with Presstek to take and market Odystar as the Latitude workflow. “That deal answers many of the questions about us in the commercial print space. A lot of other people are looking at the advantages of Concentric Screening,” he adds. “We are back in commercial print with a solid offering in all segments.”

In partnership with DuPont it has delivered a fully automated flexo plate factory; with ExxonMobil a means of delivering predictable colour on self-adhesive label materials.

Colour is a recurrent theme and lies behind a move to create a database of inks within in its Kaleidoscope colour management portfolio. The underlying idea is to control colour for brands no matter which printing process or which substrates are used. It’s a different approach to those which focus on a limited area of the design to print cycle. The colour management engine can also store the spectral profiles of the special colours that are closely tied to brand identity, with full support for overprint colours and metallics, well beyond the scope of ICC profiles. It partners with Equinox to manage colour through extended colour gamut printing systems. The aim is to simplify an area that has been perceived as difficult if not impossible before. “I believe that our ‘colour for everyone’ approach is the new reality,” says Knudsen.

The tools have led into a partnership deal with Sun Chemical, where the companies are pooling expertise. The inks company provides its inks database covering more than 300,000 packaging colours while EskoArtwork is offering the colour management expertise. While early results of the collaboration were seen at Drupa, the full roll-out will not happen until the early part of next year. When it happens, the expectation is that confusion and friction between those involved in specifying and using colour in packaging applications will be reduced.

The chief executive continues: “We have been working with Sun for two years, aiming to deliver colour consistency across different substrates. It’s not the last such agreement that we will see in this industry.”

Nor will it be the last partnership that EskoArtwork is involved in. “Conversations are happening all the time. But we need to make sure that there will be a business benefit for both of us, so any deal has to be win-win,” he adds.

The deal with HP certainly delivers this. EskoArtwork provides the software to drive the servers for HP Indigo’s new WS6000 web press. It is also providing software for Xerox’s move into packaging through its iGen engines. “These deals reflect our belief that digital and analogue printing methods will co-exist. We will see digital print volumes go up, which is why we have spent a lot of time developing our digital solutions. Digital is extremely important but cannot do everything that printers and customers want, which is why digital is not going to displace analogue for many Drupas to come. What is important is to allow our customers to decide whether to opt for digital or flexo, for example, as late as is possible.”

To date, EskoArtwork has escaped the sorts of dire warnings that have afflicted press suppliers. “The reason for that is simple. Software is not like capital equipment: it’s a low cost investment compared with buying a press and we can bring customers a lot of efficiencies. This is what we are selling at the moment,” he explains. “We can prove we can deliver a good return for customers.”