Fischer & Krecke Wins FTA Technical Innovation Award

ROSELAND, N.J.—Bobst Group company Fischer & Krecke’s smartGPS flexographic print start-up technology has won the Flexographic Technical Association (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 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 vice president, Business Unit Web Fed, North America and Andreas Kueckelmann, managing director, Fischer & Krecke GmBH, at the opening banquet of 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. smartGPS, however, 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.”

smartGPS is a new technology in registration and impression setting. Unlike conventional systems which 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.

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. With smartGPS the shorter the print runs and the more change-overs, the greater the cost savings.