Some 300 participants from more than 20 countries attended the MPS Grand Prix of Performance, held on June 10. Revealed during the event was MPS’ new logo and brand promise: “Connect to Grow.”
MPS shared its expertise in connectivity that uses unbiased data and in-depth advice to improve quality, performance and total cost of ownership (TCO) of the printing press. “Our main objective of the Grand Prix of Performance event was to show label and packaging printers how to get their productivity higher, losses lower and be far more flexible,” said Atze Bosma, CEO of MPS.
All photos courtesy of MPS
He added, “We also wanted to communicate how MPS is committed to continuous performance improvements, so that we can help our customers stay ahead.”
Connect to Grow
With the new brand promise—Connect to Grow—MPS looks beyond the machine through intensive cooperation with its customers to address all aspects involving the printing press, to help achieve the best performance and maximum return from the machine. A new logo, brand identity and MPSConnect service tie in with the vision.
To practice what MPS preaches in the new vision, the company turned its Technology & Expertise Centre into a real, eight-hour label production plant running jobs provided by Dutch printing houses Eshuis, GT-Etiketten & Labels and EDNN. Introduced was MPSConnect, to show how data from the entire production was collected and transformed into informative insights.
Bosma proclaimed, “It was really important to us to show a real production environment, with real challenges—not a perfectly prepared demonstration, but the real deal, where real mistakes are made by real people. We’ve honestly shown what needed improvement, by the fact-based data coming directly from the printing press.”
Hans Poortinga, global manager Technology & Expertise Centre and Eric Hoendervangers, co-founder of MPS shared live updates of real production data with participants throughout the event. Shown was exactly what was happening with the printing press, including speed, job changeover time, downtime, waste, total production and more insights. All the data was displayed in meaningful, significant figures—from hours down to minutes.
Poortinga said: “With total production of 36,054 meters, only 2,599 linear meters was total waste—around 7 percent, which is pretty low. But this 7 percent waste can be improved. With MPSConnect and the MPS performance team, we can lower the waste figure. It is an improvement process we offer.”
Expert Talks
In two sessions with four seminars, participants got tips and tricks on performance improvement from the MPS experts. Frank ten Broeke explained how to treat a changeover like an F1 pit stop, Poortinga showed the effects of running higher speeds without affecting print quality, Bosma demonstrated how to calculate TCO of the printing press, and Leopold der Nederlanden explained how to measure and reduce waste with best practices.
“All the tips and insights on performance improvement presented during the MPS Grand Prix event were shared to help printers increase their productivity. We really wanted to show the world how we are committed to Connect to Grow” Bosma concluded.