Fischer & Krecke Wins FTA Technical Innovation Award 2010

Published: May 03, 2010

Roseland, New Jersey | Bobst Group company Fischer & Krecke’s smartGPS flexographic print start-up technology has won the Flexographic Technical Assn. (FTA) Technical Innovation Award for 2010. Entries for this award were judged by members of the Foundation of FTA’s Technical Advancement Council and scored equally in five specific areas: Technical Achievement; Technical Impact on the Industry’s Future; Supporting Material; Description of Technology; and User Testimonials.

The award was accepted by Michael D’Angelo, Bobst Group VP, Business Unit Web Fed, North America, and Andreas Kueckelmann, Managing Director, Fischer & Krecke GmBH, at the opening banquet, May 2 at FTA Forum 2010.

Michael D’Angelo said, “We are honored to receive this recognition of Fischer & Krecke’s creativity and advanced engineering capabilities. We know the competition was strong and the judges demanding. However, smartGPS is worthy of the recognition. It is a major, industry-changing contribution to the future of flexo printing; one that significantly reduces operating costs, advances flexo versatility, and offers printers the opportunity to take a major stride toward achieving sustainable operations.”

Unlike conventional registration and impression setting systems that perform set-up in the press through a manual or automatic optical system, smartGPS does the job offline at the plate mounting stage while adding almost no additional time to that process. It virtually eliminates a major portion of the press start-up. With a press equipped with smartGPS the print setting is finalized before the job enters the press. Once the sleeves are inserted, the press can be immediately accelerated to production speed and print with the correct impression and register, literally “from the first impression.”  This process reduces waste to near zero and completely avoids low speed pre-drying issues and makes the process more sustainable than ever.