Baldwin’s Next Big Thing: Harnessing the Power of IoT in Process Automation

Steve Metcalf cofounded Air Motion Systems, one of the many companies acquired by Baldwin Technology, which combined with Baldwin Technology's UV and IR divisions, creating the AMS Spectral UV business segment. The segment manufactures LED, UV and IR curing and drying systems for commercial printing and other industrial applications.

Steve is now Baldwin's Chief Marketing and IoT officer and Executive Chairman of Baldwin’s AMS Spectral UV. From the perspective of an innovator acquired by Baldwin, who's now an integral part of the Baldwin Technology senior leadership team, he shared his thoughts on what sets Baldwin apart from its competition and what lies ahead by harnessing the power of IoT.

It's really a pleasure to be part of this larger Baldwin family. All of the companies that have been acquired by Baldwin over the last five years have been expanding Baldwin’s technology and processes. All of these companies were best in breed. We were each focused in deep in our respective areas. AMS, or Air Motion Systems people knew us at that time, was an extreme innovator in the idea of curing. - Steve Metcalf

Ultraviolet curing was beginning to shift to LED-based technology using light emitting diodes to create UV wavelengths. That happened around the 2009 through 2010 timeframe at AMS. A lot of very talented people really got into the early wave of the LED market and began expanding the application of it from a system that could be used in a lab into production systems that require high power and high intensity.

AMS was an innovator and moving very quickly in the market. And looking at other companies that were acquired by Baldwin, Ahlbrandt did the same thing with corona treatment and PC Industries and Quad Tech with inspection technology.

These companies that were so focused in depth in the area of process and enhancement technology for certain markets were brought together into this Baldwin family.

Enter IoT

Why would that matter? While there are a lot of benefits to being part of a larger company just in terms of the worldwide reach, service and support and other resources we can bring to bear, what's really exciting is how we can start connecting technologies on machines.

A packaging web machine features a UV or LED curing system; corona technology does surface treatment on stock as it rolls into the machine; inspection looks for defects as printed images come off the end of the press; and there are the self-cleaning devices. All of these things are touching the machines.

And one of our strategies, which is so exciting, is connecting technology for customers and bringing additional value through the touch points we have.

Most people are familiar with IoT, or the Internet of Things, in consumer devices. With Google Assist or an Alexa device that controls things in your home, we're using the Internet of Things to connect the process, the automation technologies, to these touch points that we have.

It’s not just connecting technology from one company, from a single source service support model, but it's also connecting it at a value level with data and information, which is where we see the industry going.

There are a lot of good companies out there that have solutions in these spaces but at the end of the day, there's no other company other than Baldwin that can connect all these in one portfolio end to end and then bring some additional value.

This is in development right now at Baldwin and we will be bringing into the market this year and we already have customers beginning to take advantage of this type of platform.

Data and analytics unlocks untapped potential

At heart, we're a technology company, and all of these areas that were involved in from vision technology to UV curing to cleaning automation, these are all technology fields. I think a lot of people know this, but maybe don't think about it every day that technology is growing at an exponential rate.

The idea of processing power in computational devices, there's so much opportunity to take what used to be considered more of a standalone automation system that was doing automatic cleaning on a cylinder or a roll or treating a surface or curing or inspecting something.

These traditionally have always been thought of as standalone products and technologies. They had their own sort of circle of control. They touch the machine and they communicate basic information back and forth through the machine about the process.

What's incredible now is the ability to unlock that information and begin to merge it together to form a bigger picture about process control. So as customers start looking at these machines and these touchpoints of process that Baldwin’s involved in, and we can begin to develop insights through data because data is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

We now have the ability to run analytics in the cloud to look for things that a lot of our customers have experienced problems with, or they've seen generate waste or quality problems over the years. They probably have a good intuition as to what's happening but they've never had the data to support that intuition and they've never been able to see it in a way that we can now see it.

What's really exciting about what Baldwin is doing is that it’s beginning to connect the technologies together at a fundamental level, using IoT platform technology and data analytics and other tools to start bringing intelligence further, be able to allow algorithms to be developed for customers that are really focused on process and quality because ultimately, many of these products are going to brand owners.

They're going to companies that care about their consistency, their brand, whether it's a prime label, whether it's a color such as the Starbucks logo. There's color control. These things are so important. And packaging has become sort of the normal mode of the future. We sit around it in our homes now and we basically receive a lot of packages every day or every week having brand consistency.

All of these things matter. One of the cool things about tying this together is that we can really start to bring the information out of these standalone systems and bring insights to it that we've never had before.

Baldwin is really becoming more of a tech company in that regard, connecting these technologies together and there's so much to do. There are so many innovations that have yet to come that we're very excited to work on and be a part of.

Next, you hear about industry 4.0 and all these things that are coming. And this is something that Baldwin's been hard at work at here for the last few years and we're super excited about that vision.

Baldwin also is an acquisition platform. So, as we go forward into the next few years, we’ll be looking at other companies that add value to this platform for Baldwin in process automation.

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Baldwin’s New ‘Unlocking Potential’ Podcast Keeps Us Connected

Most of us haven't been to any kind of trade event and probably haven't even done much travel unless we were in a service or support role since the pandemic started. Hard to believe it's been a year.

One of the things that's been lacking in our largest industrial market, which is printing, is the Drupa trade show that happens every four years and was supposed to happen last year. It got rescheduled and then it got outright canceled altogether, so it's not happening for another four years as an in-person event, although virtual.drupa is a nice touch and we are fully behind it.

And we look at a lot of the other shows that are specific to packaging or label production, and these aren't happening. The idea of person-to-person networking and all the things that happen when you discuss technology and you bring ideas forward and the excitement of these shows is missing.

Slowly, but surely, it will eventually return. But one of the ideas about the podcast was a way to start sharing a little more conversationally the ideas, the innovations that can help our customers, our partners, share what we see in the market, some of the exciting applications customers are doing with technologies. We plan to bring experts in across our company, as well as some of our partners and discuss ideas, trends, all kinds of ideas on how we can all do a better job.

So the idea of a podcast is to get to stay conversational, to stay engaged with our market, our customers, and find another medium to share information coming from Baldwin.

I think many of us have missed that face-to-face interaction. But podcasts are an incredible way of being able to share a lot of that information with people and to have conversations that we've really been missing out on quite a bit.

We're going to drill down to specific industrial enhancements and automation topics that can help improve and expand process potential across multiple different industries in today's fast changing landscape.

We're going to have episodes on topics like the fascinating world of security and banknote printing, top considerations for UV and led hearing systems and industrial applications, the evolution of technical consumables in the world of automated cleaning and so, so much more.

You're going to want to stay tuned! Subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you stay up to date with the latest episode.

Steve Metcalf

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