Digital process optimisation in the printing industry

Siegwerk, an internationally operating manufacturer of printing inks, approached us with the idea of building a digital solution that helps their customers, printing companies, to predict and thus optimize the final color result of their flexible packaging printouts.

The solution was inspired by the typical pain of industrial printers to match the outcome color of the printing machine with the initial requirements. As this problem occurs in the context of a highly complex stakeholder and industry structure, validating the viability of this product idea required a holistic opportunity exploration approach rather than simply evaluating the direct problem-solution fit.

The role of our wattx team was to consolidate all information available to our client and to research the flexible packaging printing market as well as its actors in detail. By utilising extensive user and expert interviews as well as user shadowing, we were able to visualise the process steps of typical printing companies and map relevant stakeholders, users and already existing digital solutions. Furthermore, we were able to evaluate the pain magnitude in each process step and analyse interdependencies of different problem fields.

Based on our analysis, we were able to define a clear roadmap to tackle the broad opportunity area of digital process optimisation in the flexible packaging industry.