CylindIQ - Cordef Software

The Problem

Cylinder Changeovers Are Expensive and Often Avoidable

In printing operations, each cylinder serves one product configuration at a time. When a new order arrives for a different product, operators must decide which cylinders to convert, a decision that directly impacts cost, throughput and deadlines.

Without the right tools, this decision comes down to experience and guesswork:

No visibility into which products will be ordered next week
Converting away from high-demand products triggers costly reconversions
Cylinder sharing groups are overlooked, one bad conversion disrupts multiple products
Manually tracking hundreds of cylinders across status changes is slow and error-prone
There is no way to test a changeover policy before it touches live inventory

Core Capabilities

Everything You Need to Manage Cylinder Inventory

CylindIQ integrates demand forecasting, physical constraint optimization, and AI-driven candidate scoring in a single desktop application, purpose-built for printing operations.

01

AI Changeover Recommendation

For any incoming production order, CylindIQ evaluates every compatible cylinder in your inventory, computes opportunity costs, and produces a ranked changeover list, with full reasoning for each item selected.

02

Demand Forecasting

Blended short- and long-term demand rates with configurable weight factors. Confidence scoring based on historical data depth. Automatic trend detection (↑ rising / ↓ falling) per product, used to protect fast-growing configurations.

03

Full-Order Simulation

Feed any sequence of historical or planned orders into the simulator. CylindIQ processes each order in delivery-date order, applies live recommendations, and exports a complete report, total changeovers, costs, and item-level decisions.

04

Shared Cylinders Awareness

Products that share cylinder configurations are grouped. Opportunity cost is computed at the group level, so converting a shared cylinder correctly penalises all member products, not just the one directly configured on it.

05

Configurable Algorithm Parameters

All 19 parameters, demand window lengths, rate weights, physical clearances, cost assumptions, are tunable through a structured settings interface. Changes apply immediately; no code deployment required.

06

Integrated Management Platform

Includes production order management, customer and product catalogue, MRO inventory tracking, ERP data import, and multi-user access control, all in one unified desktop application.

How It Works

From Incoming Order to Ranked Changeover List in Seconds

CylindIQ evaluates every physically compatible cylinder in your inventory against two scoring factors:

Opportunity Cost
Length Utilisation

Every recommendation includes confidence levels, trend indicators, and plain-language reasoning, so operators can make an informed decision or override as needed.

Simulation

Test Your Changeover Strategy Before It Touches Live Inventory

Load any historical or planned order sequence and run it through the optimizer end-to-end. CylindIQ processes each order chronologically, applies its recommendations, and updates the inventory state, exactly as it would in real operations.

Processes thousands of orders automatically with live progress counter
Demand forecasts are computed at each order's delivery date for realistic results
Tracks cumulative conversions, costs, skipped and duplicate orders
Exports a full timestamped report, every decision, every score, every item
Algorithm parameter block is prepended to each report for full reproducibility

Use simulation to compare policies, validate parameter changes, or build confidence before deploying a new changeover strategy to your production floor.

Use Cases

Built for Real Production Scenarios

CylindIQ addresses the changeover decisions production planners face every day, and the strategic questions operations managers ask every quarter.

Daily Production Planning

Before each shift, select tomorrow's incoming orders and get an instant ranked answer: which cylinders to convert today, and in which priority order, so the floor is ready before the run starts.

Avoiding Costly Reconversions

CylindIQ protects high-demand and trending products from being converted away, eliminating the costly cycle of converting and immediately reconverting the same cylinder for the same product a week later.

New Product Introduction

Evaluate which existing cylinders can serve a new product with no changeover (via sharing groups) and estimate the demand impact before committing to the order, using simulation over a representative order sequence.

Policy Validation & Auditing

Run the full historical order history through the simulator to review past changeover decisions, measure actual versus optimised cost, and benchmark different parameter configurations against each other.

Benefits

Measurable Impact on Operations

Fewer unnecessary changeovers, protect high-demand configurations automatically
Lower reconversion costs, stop converting cylinders needed again next week
Better cylinder utilisation through precise length-ratio matching
Decisions in seconds instead of hours of manual cross-referencing
True group-level opportunity cost, shared cylinders are never ignored
Full audit trail for every recommendation and simulation run
Algorithm tunable to your specific operation, no developer involvement needed

Target Users

Who Uses CylindIQ

Designed for operations teams at printing companies managing cylinder inventory across multiple product lines and machine configurations.

Production Planners MRO Inventory Managers Operations Managers Plant Supervisors