Business News
The first BOBST ACCUBRAILLE in Germany is installed at Gebr. FRANK GmbH & KG, in Gera
Tuesday 20. May 2008 - Gebr. Frank GmbH & KG recently acquired a BOBST MISTRAL 110 folder-gluer line, equipped with an ACCUBRAILLE module for the embossing of Braille.
Based in Gera, a city in the state of Thuringia in the east of Germany, this family company perfectly combines tradition and innovation. Founded in 1914, and “re-privatized” in 1990, it simultaneously serves the worlds of printing and packaging, with 70% of its sales turnover coming from cartons, and the remainder from print. With nearly 50 employees, the companys sales turnover reached 3.3 million Euros in 2007 (up from 2.3m Euros in 2001). The company is proud that it does not owe its financial health to price increases, but rather to production volume increases, which have even enabled it to lower its prices.
Certified to DIN EN ISO 9002 since 1994, intense activity in the pharmaceutical packaging sector has brought Gebr. FRANK to seek ways to help it fulfill the requirements of Good Manufacturing Practice as applied to the manufacture of drugs. In addition to concentrating its pharmaceutical packaging manufacture in a new factory in the near future, the company is also reinforcing its folder-gluer machine roster. European legislation requiring Braille marking on packaging has made it worth the company reconsidering its processes for embossing. Up until now, this has been achieved on a platen press, but the launch of the BOBST ACCUBRAILLE module allowed Harald Frank, owner of Gebr. FRANK GmbH & KG, to re-examine its manufacturing processes for pharmaceutical boxes.
This ACCUBRAILLE module is the first installed in Germany and, thanks to the very latest in technology, it brings with it interesting competitive advantages. As well as showing to Gebr. FRANK customers the companys capacity for finding clever solutions, the BOBST MISTRAL 110 folder-gluer with ACCUBRAILLE also offers the company the opportunity of acquiring new customers, developing new market segments, ensuring it can deliver contracts at competitive prices and, finally, of guaranteeing the quality of its production.
Many advantages
The benefits of embossing Braille using the folder-gluer, immediately before the gluing station, were clearly identified by Harald Frank. The boxes are embossed one by one, unlike embossing on the platen press, and so only need one embossing tool per job, and not one per station on the sheet. Harald Frank expresses his opinion without reservation: “Since on a small size (0b) press there can be twenty boxes, the consequences are significant. The cost of the tools is high; their setting time is long since each box must be identically embossed; and finally, check operations on each tool eat into production time because they must be documented. It is also difficult to identify defective boxes in a production run and this insecurity is permanent because the defects are not easily detected by eye. If a dot misses, the operator may not detect it. To this is added the storage of the tools, whose classification must be rigorous in order to easily identify them for repeat jobs, because they are difficult to differentiate”.
For Harald Frank “the ACCUBRAILLE module will bring a greater quality of embossing.
With its rotary system, and larger & more regular dot height, sampled controls will be more homogeneous. It will also bring greater flexibility to us because diecutting will no longer be the bottleneck in production. Productivity will be better, preparation being faster; the platen will not be jammed with work; and the feeder of the folder-gluer will no longer be blocked by blanks stuck together by the upstream embossed dots”.