Automating pre-press in a corrugated cardboard plant
Software into a floor where nobody cares what framework you used
Context
A corrugated packaging plant. Pre-press sat between sales and the printing line: artwork arrived in whatever state the customer sent it, and a small team turned it into something the machines could run. The process worked, and it worked because of people, not systems.
Constraint
Industrial environments have a specific failure mode for software: the tool gets installed, and the workaround survives. If the new path is slower than the old one at any single step, the old one wins, and it wins silently.
What I built
We started from scratch and set aside the techniques inherited from post-print flexography, building a purely digital workflow instead: a first check by the operator in PackZ, then a complete pipeline for color management and variable data printing.
That first manual check stayed in on purpose. Customer files arrived from whatever software they happened to use — Illustrator, Photoshop, others — and only a human operator could catch the artifacts the import introduced.
What happened
At first the whole flow ran by hand, in Illustrator and Photoshop, color correction included. That was the point: it let the team learn how the press actually behaved before anything was automated. Only after a few months did we automate color correction, with GMG ColorServer and colorimetry.