Inkjet & Digital Printing

PEMARA SELECTS HP INDIGO DIGITAL PRESSES TO PRINT FLEXIBLE, COST-EFFECTIVE AND HIGH-QUALITY LABELS AND PACKAGING

Thursday 09. August 2012 - Established in 1966, Pemara was the first company to introduce rotary self-adhesive label printing machinery to Australia. Since then, it has continued to pioneer the label printing industry by embracing a range of revolutionary technologies. Pemara employs over 250 people across four printing sites and five sales offices across South East Asia and Australia.

Pemara was predominantly a self-adhesive letterpress printing business with offset combination printing capability. It also produced Fix-a-Form labels from its headquarters plant in Melbourne. However, in order to address the evolving demands of Australia’s businesses, Pemara decided to
invest in digital presses. Traditional conventional printing could meet the needs of conventional print jobs where large volumes at low price are critical, but these created inventory management and cost control problems. However, short-run projects were prohibitively expensive. Emerging markets, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, demanded a more flexible solution, which is why Pemara turned to HP Indigo Digital Presses.
The pharmaceutical challenge
There are a number of very specific factors which apply to the pharmaceutical industry. It is highly regulated, which means that packaging must change when legislation changes. It also relies on branding to differentiate its product and market to the consumer, so packaging needs to be
colorful and eye-catching. Therefore, traditional conventional printing was not suitable as it takes large-volume orders to make it economical.
“In Australia the amount of time and money spent on regulatory changes and artwork for pharmaceutical packaging is exorbitant,” explains Damien Prunty, general manager at Pemara. “In terms of offset printing, we’re looking at four-color artwork, up to 300 SKUs and three or more changes per year dictated by legislation or branding. That’s potentially thousands of variations multiplied by AU$120 per plate. The costs soon stack up. To make economic sense, far more labels than are needed are printed, leaving our clients with a lot of inventory that is soon out of date. Typically, a customer might order 10,000 labels and only use 2,000 before having to order a changed version. That adds up to a lot of wasted inventory.”
Flexibility, speed and quality
Since purchasing its first HP Indigo Digital Press in 2001, Pemara has built its digital side of the business and now has three presses across Australia and Malaysia, including an Indigo WS6000 and two ws4500 models. The HP Indigo WS6000 Digital Press enables label and packaging printers to transfer jobs up to 5,000 linear meters from conventional printing to digital – at lower cost – while achieving superior quality, productivity and profitability. The technology enables greater flexibility in print volumes but also allows the company to print on a wider variety of materials using different colors.
“The HP Indigo presses have opened up whole new potential areas of business for us, without compromising on print quality,” adds Prunty. “For FMCG companies we can produce full color, flexible packaging in low numbers to create samples for new products before they become mass produced. The ability to print with white ink enables us to produce clear labels or print to polypropylene or clear flexibles. We’re also producing digitally printed cartons in small to medium volumes on our WS6000, which gives the freedom to print on a range of different board grades. Flexibility our customers love and to the highest quality.”
The digital approach also allows Pemara to complete print jobs more quickly without compromising on quality: “Not having to go through the plate-making process has definitely saved time in getting jobs to press. However, more efficient front-end workflow solutions are critical to keep up with the increased number of jobs going through the digital printing stream of the business. The most important thing is to ensure the highest possible quality and, on this level, the HP presses do not disappoint. The print quality is excellent; there are lots of pitfalls and flaws in the traditional side that you simply don’t see in digital – there is no color variation; we don’t
run out of ink. Liquid ink technology means we’re getting
the same high quality but with better consistency. Less color variation throughout the run means a more efficient operation and means less work is required to edit unsatisfactory material out during the quality control process.”
In addition, the process is more efficient and minimizes media waste, increasing the amount of saleable material Pemara can produce.
“One of the inherent advantages of digital printing is the reduction in print media wastage, both in set up waste reduction, and run waste,” comments Prunty. “Quantifying a cost saving is difficult, but it is safe to say that savings on waste from both a cost and a source-reduction perspective are significant when producing small- to medium-sized production runs.”
The future is digital
Digital printing has become critical to Pemara’s success and is set to become more important as the technology develops. Having been a HP Indigo user for a decade, the company expects to continue investing in each new iteration of the digital press.
“The technology gets better, more reliable and faster with each generation and will continue to increase its share of the conventional print market. There is no doubt in my mind that HP is the leader for digitally printed labels,” concludes Prunty. “We’ll remain at the forefront of digital printing with HP and will certainly be the first in line to install the next wave of Indigo technology when it becomes available.”