There is a quote, usually attributed to American scholar, organizational consultant, and author Warren Bennis (1925–2014) that goes, “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” I am always reminded of this quote when we talk about automation in the printing industry, and the desire to minimize—or even completely eliminate—human touches. More people are bringing their dogs to work these days; at some point, will the dogs be leaving their humans at home?

For at least the past decade, in our industry surveys and conversations with vendors and print business owners, we have often heard about a great desire to implement “automation.” But do we have a precise definition of what exactly “automation” is? In general commercial printing, the idea is “file in, print out,” ideally without having human hands touch the file or any other part of the job. This is coming pretty close to reality, but in wide format, the argument has always been that it was too “craft-like” and consisted of too many one-off jobs for an automated approach to be effective. To what extent is that still the case today? Are we getting closer to true wide-format automation?

The most conspicuous aspect of wide-format automation is in the area of loading and offloading—automatically feeding a wide-format machine. Until recently, says Larry D’Amico, Director of Sales-North America for Durst, “I looked at automation as what I would generally call ‘pallet in, pallet out,’ the ability to load a pallet on one end and have it stacked on a pallet on the back end.” Durst machines have had this ability for some time, and more and more models are adding this kind of functionality. Others—like Fujifilm’s Inca Onset X3—have a robotic arm that automatically loads and unloads boards from the machine. (Cutting tables from the likes of Esko and Zünd have also been adding robotic arms for on- and off-boarding.)