Industrial printing and finishing machinery manufacturer with digital transformation focus
Koenig & Bauer manufactures printing presses and converting equipment across sheetfed offset, digital, and specialty substrates—a 200+-year-old industrial business now mid-transformation. The tech stack reveals a dual operating model: embedded systems (C, Structured Text, EtherCAT, PROFINET) driving machine hardware, paired with enterprise software (SAP S/4HANA, Kubernetes, Spring Boot, cloud functions) for operations and digitalization. Active SAP adoption combined with pain points around legacy system migration and heterogeneous system integration suggests a company rebuilding its software backbone to support remote service delivery and connected-machine capabilities.
Koenig & Bauer is the world's oldest printing press manufacturer, founded in 1817 in Würzburg, Germany. The company supplies integrated machinery and software solutions for printing, finishing, and converting processes, with particular strength in packaging substrates (corrugated, film, metal, glass) alongside traditional printing (newspapers, books, magazines, security printing). Operations span eleven production sites across Europe and a global sales and service network. The product portfolio ranges from banknote presses to digital printing systems, serving both commercial printers and packaging converters worldwide.
Embedded systems run on C, Structured Text, EtherCAT, and PROFINET. Enterprise software uses SAP S/4HANA, Kubernetes, Spring Boot, Java, and cloud functions (AWS Lambda, Azure, Google Cloud). Architecture documentation includes TOGAF and ArchiMate.
Major initiatives include SAP S/4HANA enterprise rollout, UV/IR/hot-air drying system development for offset presses, production process digitalization, knowledge management system implementation, and dashboard/metrics development for operational visibility.
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