Laurie Pilling, managing director, Admark says the main challenge Admark faced was in identifying a digital label print solution that would give his customers quality output, he says, “The quality of print and colour from the SurePress is such that we can now spread heavy workloads across flexo and the SurePress without any discernible difference.”
Admark entered the label printing business using letterpress and flexographic printing equipment, and according to Pilling the only cost-effective label print jobs using this technology had to be long run as short runs were simply not profitable.
One third of Admark’s print volumes is labels, and 80 per cent of all label work is food and beverage, with the other 20 per cent being industrial.
Conventional job runs range up to a million pieces while the short run jobs range from 500 up to 10,000, and substrates run at roughly 50 per cent synthetics and 50 per cent paper, with gloss making up 75 per cent of that.
Pilling says, “To do a short run of 5000 labels on flexo the printing time would take only 15 minutes, but there’s the additional overhead of two hours for mounting the plates and setup, then, at the completion of the job, washing the plates and cleaning up.”
“On top of that, there are tooling costs, all of which have to be passed on to the client. So by eliminating the costs and dramatically reducing production time, we’re now passing cost savings on to the client and turning many jobs around in a fraction of the time and at short notice.”
Craig Heckenberg, business unit manager, Epson Australia says, “It is gratifying to see a customer happy with an Epson product as Laurie is with SurePress. We are more than confident that SurePress will continue to produce quality label output, including variable data labels, and reduce costs, making short run label jobs profitable for Admark for many yeasr to come.
Admark is based in Hamilton, New Zealand, and has sites in Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua and Sydney.
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