Highcon Systems (Yavne, Israel) and Tilia Labs (Ottawa, Ontario) have announced a partnership that will build the unique software capabilities of Tilia Phoenix into every Highcon system going forward and offer them to existing customers. As part of this partnership, Tilia Labs will develop functionality to automatically place optimized nicks and stripping lines within the base version of Tilia Phoenix software, the company’s flagship planning and imposition application that employs Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology enabling optimal imposition and dynamic jobs ganging. These capabilities will reduce the number of make-readies and operators’ time on every job and allow Highcon customers to produce more jobs per shift with maximum efficiency and reduced waste.
The inclusion of Tilia Labs’ AI-driven imposition software that enables dynamic ganging is integral to Highcon’s Digital Manufacturing vision that seeks to break the long-standing link between the number of customer jobs and the number of projected jobs. By allowing Tilia Phoenix to account for all jobs in queue and key parameters such as due dates, order quantities, and finishing, Tilia Phoenix generates optimized combinations that reduce the number of production runs, make-readies and changeovers. When combined with Highcon’s Digital Die-cutting systems, this approach moves from the realm of theory to the real world and allows converters to process many more jobs per shift, increasing total throughput and revenue. This approach is applicable both with digitally printed and conventionally printed cartons.