Livonia installs Keyline as the brain for their fully automated workflow solution.

The workflow at the Latvian book printing company Livonia Print, is being controlled from receipt of order by the publishers, through to delivery by a cloud-based portal built by Crispy Mountain Gmbh, the developers of Keyline.

The transparent integration of applications, systems and machines and a controlled workflow across all stages of the value chain create the basis for a future-oriented business.

The technical basis for this is a totally networked systems at all process stages. On the software side, Keyline controls all the production steps from the quote to the delivery of the finished product.

Livonia specialise in printing books and produce more than 40 million books every year, with the average circulation in offset printing now standing at only around 2,500 copies per order. In certain areas, such as reprints or printing of products from publishers' backlists, the trend is even as low as a few hundred books per title.

Marc Freitag, Digital Business Development Manager at Livonia Print says: "The only way we could handle these requirements was to transform the company into a smart factory with a fully automated process."

According to Freitag, this requires highly automated equipment in the areas of press and post press. However, this alone does not help if the machines were not fed with the right data at the right time in order to generate actions from them. The holistic solution at Livonia is therefore a joint project with Keyline and OEM’s such as Heidelberg, Canon Océ, Muller Martini, Hunkeler.

Muller Martini integrates the digital printing press from Canon via its Connex workflow system and modules, Keyline fully integrates with Mullar Martini, Canon and Heidelberg’s Prinect which handles the imposition of PDF files including job management on the press. In addition, the Hunkeler POPP6 bookline for the production of roll-to-roll on continuous digital printing systems as well as the digital book sewing machine Ventura Digital and the bookline Diamant Digital, both from Muller Martini, were integrated into the environment via Connex.

All systems are integrated via the Connex-Line-Control (job presetting’s via JDF) and Connex Info (reporting, monitoring, JMF) with Keyline being used as a higher-level system. Marc Freitag says: "For order acceptance, we have developed our own portal using Keyline, through which publishers can place their orders. This portal transmits all the data to Keyline, which builds the respective production. This allows us to provide a dynamic calculation in real time for every product in our portfolio.

The Livonia system is suitable as a blueprint for almost every printing company. Their strategies and workflows can be scaled to suit almost any printing environment.