Esko has unveiled its latest print inspection innovation, AVT iCenter, which aims to empower label converters to easily manage quality and production standards across jobs, printing equipment, shifts and sites.

The launch of AVT iCenter is part of the latest raft of new innovations and solutions upgrades from Esko, developed to deliver more functionality for its integrated software and hardware range, as well as more value to packaging, label and wide format customers.

The cloud-based platform integrates with Esko Automation Engine and AVT Helios automated inline inspection solutions for label and narrow web printing.

“Connecting between prepress and inspection, iCenter enables users to control and deliver one standardized source of truth throughout the quality inspection setup process,” Esko AVT alliances and workflow solutions director Ornit Gluzman said.

“With increasingly shorter job lengths and lead times, today’s label suppliers already face significant challenges. These are compounded by the constraints of siloed software applications and duplicating data between the prepress, inspection and production process.

“The inspection job setup process is often manual and fragmented, leading to significant lost time in setting up the right quality level for each job before print and then waiting for supervisors to approve them.

“At the same time, the manual process makes it challenging to control quality on jobs across various different operators and systems, while inaccurate or non-specific quality inspection setup can dramatically affect production speed.

“But with iCenter, inspection quality standards are defined only once and then leveraged automatically throughout the process to every live job. This means that quality standards – and therefore products – are consistent across sites, with 100 per cent hands-free on-press operation eliminating the need for operator input and in turn, human error.”

Ornit further explained that with automated touchless workflow through the Esko integrated solution AutoSet, iCenter enables label and narrow web converters to eliminate errors and have consistent, standardised, company-wide inspection quality standards.

“Inspection make-ready is automated, based on machine learning and AI-based image analysis and there’s also support for multi-site operations to ensure consistency across a business, regardless of which facility completes the job,” she said.

“With total digitisation, all the operator has to do is type a job name or scan a barcode and iCenter retrieves and applies all the standards for the job – the whole process takes just 20 to 30 seconds.”