Engineered Printing Solutions: Labor Shortages Drive Demand for Automated DTO Printing

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Automation drives adoption: Manufacturers are investing in automated direct-to-object printing systems to reduce labor dependency, improve consistency, and better integrate decoration into production workflows.
• EPS reaches milestone: Engineered Printing Solutions has surpassed 100 single-pass DTO system installations.

Engineered Printing Solutions (EPS) is seeing growing demand for automated direct-to-object (DTO) printing systems as manufacturers across multiple markets respond to labor shortages, skills gaps, and the push for more integrated, efficient production.

The trend has helped drive EPS beyond the milestone of 100 single-pass DTO systems, reflecting a broader shift in how manufacturers now evaluate decoration technology.

Reducing Manual Labor

Across plastics, packaging, medical, industrial, and promotional applications, manufacturers are increasingly focused not just on print quality but on how decoration can be automated, standardized, and integrated more tightly into production. Demand is being driven by the need to reduce manual labor, improve consistency across shifts, and build more scalable manufacturing workflows.

The growth reflects the wider move away from labor-intensive decoration processes and toward automation-ready production cells that combine printing with robotics, pretreatment, vision inspection, and material handling. This aligns with broader industry pressures. Nearly half of respondents to Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing’s annual survey said labor shortages had a negative effect on their businesses in 2025, and 57% said they plan to buy robots or other automation equipment in 2026.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data also show that plastics and rubber products manufacturing employed 695,800 people in April 2026, including 526,000 production and nonsupervisory employees. The same BLS data highlight average hourly earnings of $32.03 for all employees and $26.07 for production and non-supervisory employees in April 2026, reinforcing the need for technologies that improve efficiency, consistency, and output.

“Manufacturers are not just looking for a better way to print. They are looking for a better way to produce,” Kenneth Stack, executive chairman of EPS, says. “What we are seeing across markets is growing demand for decoration systems that reduce labor dependency, address skills challenges, and fit into a more automated, integrated manufacturing environment.”

EPS has identified that in many decoration environments, labor is the largest contributor to true cost per part, with training, turnover, manual setup, and shift-to-shift variation often outweighing consumables. Its position is that the value of DTO comes not just from digital print capability but from the ability to engineer labor out of the process and create stable, repeatable production systems. The business recently set out that case in more detail in its white paper, The Shift in Direct-to-Object Printing, which outlines how single-pass UV inkjet can improve ROI through lower setup costs, greater labor efficiency, and faster payback in suitable applications. EPS reports these trends in print applications spanning plastics, packaging, promotional goods, medical, industrial, and consumer products.

Direct-to-object printing a hard hat. | Credit: Engineered Printing Solutions

“We are seeing a progression from operator-assisted automation to semi-autonomous operation and ultimately lights-out decoration, where parts move through printing, curing, inspection, and tracking with minimal human intervention,” Stack adds. “As decoration becomes more integrated into manufacturing workflows, quality becomes more consistent, traceability improves, and changeovers become more recipe-driven and predictable. That is what is driving automation growth in DTO and interest in our printing systems.”