Oosterhout, March 2017  - Q.I. Press Controls (QIPC) and Koenig & Bauer (KBA) can look back on a successful partnership which has meanwhile endured for a whole two decades. QIPC’s cooperation with the world’s oldest and second-largest press manufacturer began back in 1997, just one year after the company was first established. The young start-up was offered the chance to integrate its newly developed register scanning heads into KBA’s web offset presses for trial purposes. 

Ever since then, more and more KBA customers have been choosing QIPC’s innovative systems as a way to increase their print quality and production efficiency while cutting waste and costs. Today, QIPC is a KBA “Preferred Supplier” for automatic colour and register controls. The partnership covers both orders for new machines, such as the two KBA Cortina web presses ordered earlier this year by Coldset Printing Partners, the Belgian newspaper printer, and retrofit business. The current large-scale project for the Austrian Mediaprint Group’s newspaper printing sites is just one example that underlines the important role played by retrofit solutions. In future, the two firms will increasingly collaborate beyond classic commercial and newspaper web offset and step up their activities in digital and packaging printing.  

As a testament to the longstanding partnership, which is founded on mutual respect and passionate commitment on both sides, QIPC Chairman Menno Jansen took advantage of a recent visit to the KBA headquarters in Würzburg, Germany, to present a sculpture to Christoph Müller, Managing Director of KBA-Digital & Web Solutions and a member of the KBA Group management. Titled “Future Through Cooperation”, the sculpture is a work by Dutch artist Corry Ammerlaan-van Niekerk which symbolises how shared success is achieved through shared responsibility.  

“We need partners whose detailed solution know-how can help us adapt our innovative and efficient printing systems to the specific needs of our clients”, said Christoph Müller. “Q.I. Press Controls is a reliable partner to KBA in this respect, which regularly sets benchmarks with innovations in its own products. The partnership between our companies hasn’t simply functioned impressively as a business alliance over the last two decades, however; it also works very well on a personal level.”

“We’re delighted that our expertise in optical press control systems is contributing to the success of KBA and its customers. Cooperation between two suppliers should always result in a better solution for end users and that’s definitely been the case throughout our relationship with KBA”, Menno Jansen added. “If we can manage to uphold the spirit of this partnership together in the future, I’m confident that the next twenty years will be just successful as the last.”

Christoph Müller "The partnership between our companies hasn’t simply functioned impressively as a business alliance over the last two decades, however; it also works very well on a personal level.”