From creative intent to production reality.
CMYK2 covers the print and packaging lifecycle in four plates: artwork and premedia; prepress, colour and compliance; production and press; and the business of print. Each plate carries one part of the work and is set at its own screen angle; overprinted, they make the finished print.
- What breaks today
- What CMYK2 does about it
- What comes next
Artwork & premedia
From the brief to finished artwork and every variant of it.
What breaks today
- Concepts go round for weeks, then fail in production.
- Every size, flavour and market variant is redrawn by hand.
- Artwork and the dieline drift apart between tools.
What CMYK2 does
- Concept directions from a brief, across selectable creative territories NPD
- Dieline reader: preset, uploaded, or taken from a photo NPD
- Browser artwork editor: layers, pen, Pathfinder, gradients, text on path Packaging Studio
- One master artwork to size × flavour × market variants, batch-exported Packaging Studio
Next on the roadmap
- Concept feasibility against your substrates, machines, tooling and MOQs
- Cost-target checks at concept stage
- Advanced vector tools: offset path, text wrap, symbols
Prepress, colour & compliance
Making the file match the press, the brand colour and the law.
What breaks today
- Preflight problems surface at the printer, after the plates are ordered.
- Brand colour is judged by eye on a different screen.
- One regulation changes and nobody knows which SKUs it touches.
What CMYK2 does
- Preflight: resolution, bleed, safe zone, RGB in CMYK, ink coverage, fonts, text size, barcode zone
- Automatic trapping with presets for offset, flexo, gravure and digital
- PDF/X-4 export with an embedded ICC profile and a conformance check
- CIEDE2000 ΔE colour governance; spot colours defined in Lab
- Coded rule packs for India, EU, UK and global standards APMS
- Text read off the artwork and compared to approved copy; barcode and Braille checks
Next on the roadmap
- Spectrophotometer and press-side ΔE measurement
- RIP, screening and JDF to platesetter
- A live regulatory feed (rules are coded and versioned today)
Production & press
Getting more good sheets out of every press hour.
What breaks today
- The press runs a paper list, and washes ink all shift.
- Jobs are scheduled before the board or ink has arrived.
- Real set-up time, speed and waste are known only at month end.
What CMYK2 does
- A constraint solver (OR-Tools CP-SAT) with your own changeover table PressPilot
- Material gate: no job before its board, ink or PO is in PressPilot
- Every promised date checked against the actual finish PressPilot
- Five ways in for floor data, and OEE against planned production time PressConnect
- Actual set-up, speed and waste per machine and substrate PressConnect
Next on the roadmap
- Offset, flexo and gravure process physics (folding carton is modelled first)
- Protocol clients validated on real presses
- Live re-planning from floor events
The business of print
The key plate holds the detail. The key numbers hold the business.
What breaks today
- Quotes come off an old rate card, so you win the job and lose the margin.
- Margin is known six weeks after the month.
- Every department has its own number for the same job.
What CMYK2 does
- Deterministic estimating: imposition, make-ready, wastage, finishing, machine-hour rates
- Margin guard: blocks or flags a quote below your floor or far from your price history
- RFQ emails read into a draft estimate for review
- GST-ready quotes; quote-to-order hand-off
- Prepress, plates and dies, ink kitchen, production, QC, dispatch and job work records Operix Print
Next on the roadmap
- Job margin and OTIF per job
- Estimate against actual on every job
- Floor actuals re-pricing the next quote
Two closed loops.
The stages don't run once. A packaging brief comes back as the next variant; a print estimate comes back as the floor's actuals, which re-price the next quote.
Brief to shelf. Estimate to outcome.
Packaging runs as one loop: a brief becomes concepts, artwork and variants, passes compliance and approval, and leaves as a print-ready PDF/X-4, ready for the next brief.
Print runs as the other: the estimate becomes a promised date, the press run becomes floor actuals, and the actuals re-price the next quote. Every job teaches the next one to protect your margin.
Follow 50,000 cartons round the print loop.
One folding-carton job, end to end, as the print loop is designed to run it. Step through it, or let it play. The customer is fictional and every number is illustrative.
Job born
50,000 folding cartons, SBS 300 gsm, 4 colours + UV, die-cut; customer wants Thursday.
Where does your lifecycle leak?
Pick the plate that hurts most today. That's where we start.