Tilia Labs (Ottawa, Ontario), a leading developer of planning and imposition solutions for the printing and graphic arts industry, has announced it’s now offering its Artificial-Intelligence-driven (AI-driven) software technology to boost productivity for HP Indigo digital printing users. Central to the collaboration with HP Indigo is Tilia Labs’ flagship software Tilia Phoenix. The planning and imposition software uses AI technology to reduce costs and optimize production in all print segments – including packaging, labels, commercial and wide-format printing. Its AI-generated layouts eliminate the need for template-based imposition, and instead adapt to manufacturing requirements and constraints – an innovation that earned Tilia Phoenix a 2019 InterTech Technology Award.
Tilia Phoenix’s Imposition AI works quickly enough to keep up with the fastest presses on the market, the company added. For the HP Indigo user community, the partnership opens up value-added opportunities in several key market segments including:
- Labels & Flexible Packaging. Tilia Phoenix narrow-web label frame and lane optimization and automation plus Tilia Aries quick and easy, drag-and-drop layout creation.
- Folding Carton. Dynamic nesting and die generation, varnish/coating blanket creation, auto-calculated CAD-based step-and-repeat, intelligent artwork-to-dieline snapping, and a die template library with pattern matching to find and re-use inventoried standing dies.
- Commercial Sheetfed. Dynamic imposition for flat and folded work, template-free just-in-time planning, cost-based evaluation of digital versus conventional, auto-calculation of creep compensation and lips, configurable binding edges, and custom folding patterns via an easy-to-use GUI tool or API.
- Commercial Webfed. Lane-batching AI algorithm optimizes commercial book printing by balancing across multiple lanes to utilize the full width of the web, driving down material and click costs.
“With Tilia Phoenix, HP Indigo users benefit from cost-optimized layouts and dynamic imposing on-the-fly,” said Tilia Labs’ CEO Sagen de Jonge. “For the first time, print providers can accurately determine the breaking point between conventional and digital printing, maximize press time and materials, and instantaneously reimpose jobs as changes in the production environment dictate.” Tilia Phoenix can easily integrate with any workflow or MIS system to enrich job estimation, reduce time in planning, maximize press time, and reduce postpress complexity. Tilia Labs also adds HP-supported JDF output to streamline job submission to the HP Digital Front End (DFE).
“We are very excited to establish this powerful relationship with Tilia Labs, offering HP Indigo digital press owners innovation, efficiency and confidence for production challenges – including sophisticated ganging, device profiling and specialized imposition requirements,” said Patrick Canfield, R&D Program Manager of Strategic Accounts at HP Indigo. “For print service providers, these values translate to bottom-line production cost savings and better utilization of their printing equipment.”
