#350 When Direct-to-Shape Meets AI, Automation & Personalization with Florian Fässler, Polytype

Yeah, and the story of Polytype is great.

You've obviously transitioned.

You still have a very strong analog business and technology and experience in that in terms of direct-to-shape.

But if you're looking...

Let's have a chat about the... analog to digital journey if you look back over the past decade what do you consider perhaps to have been the biggest technological breakthroughs in direct to shape digital printing um and how have they changed what manufacturers can now achieve

um yeah so so what we see when i compared to to uh Ten years back, we can now have larger throw distances and still print reliably under industrial conditions.

We don't want to miss nozzles every three minutes, so this is very important.

And in order to get there, we had to learn a lot.

For instance, to understand airflow inside our machine, a direct-to-shape machine is much more complex in terms of turbulences and airflow than a label machine, for instance.

You could say we're printing inside a big mixer, which is a challenge, but we managed to overcome that thanks to modern computer simulations and thanks to that design, the countermeasures that allowed us to get further.

And also very important is modern printers combined with waveform optimization so we can achieve higher drop speed and less satellites.

This is a bit the technology part.

Other than that, we see also now when we speak more about business, we see mass customization.

We print, for instance, on drinking bottles, reusable drinking bottles, where we can turn a piece of plastic into a personalized item that can be used and valued every day.

You see that kids go to school with their water bottles, people go to fitness, they go cycling, they go hiking.

It's really

an object of daily use that has a high value.

And we can produce that kind of product now with over 100 pieces per minute and still have a different

product all the time.

So

this requires not only the good mechanics, which Polytype is known for since many, many years, but we also have to build up the

necessary data processing and software capabilities.

When I look more into the learnings we had from the OEM business, They really will see in the next months or years quite dramatic changes.

Industries like automotive, they really embrace the advantages of digital printing.

And for us, it's really interesting.