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Digital printing, creasing, cutting come to carton converting

Folding carton converter Boutwell Owens & Co. is among the first in the world to combine wide-format sheet-fed digital printing and digital creasing with cutting.

CARTONS DONE DIGITALLY. Boutwell Owens is among the first in the U.S. to install this fully digital carton creasing and cutting system.
CARTONS DONE DIGITALLY. Boutwell Owens is among the first in the U.S. to install this fully digital carton creasing and cutting system.

“If you walk around our plant, you’ll quickly see that, like so many plants where folding cartons are made, a lot of space is occupied by dies. We have dies everywhere, even though we’re always purging them. So when we first heard about carton finishing equipment that replaces physical dies with digital technology, we were immediately interested in
learning more.”

That’s how Vice President Sales & Marketing Bill Hodges of Boutwell Owens & Co. describes why this Fitchburg, MA-based firm was so intrigued when Highcon introduced its Euclid system, the world’s first fully digital creasing and cutting machine for converting folding cartons. Euclid greatly streamlines the tried-and-true but rather cumbersome process of creasing and cutting cartons that is used today. It also reduces the need for the highly skilled employees typically needed to make carton creasing and cutting dies, which involves the skilled hammering of steel rules into sheets of plywood. And finally, because it does away with conventional dies, it frees up storage space formerly occupied by those dies.

As appealing as such manufacturing and operations advantages may be, the real value in digital carton creasing and cutting lies in what it permits Boutwell Owens to bring to its customers: an unmatched ability to meet the growing need for shorter runs of packaging materials now that micro-segmentation, SKU proliferation, and event-driven packaging campaigns are increasingly popular among the Consumer Packaged Goods companies of the world.

Making the Boutwell Owens story all the more intriguing is that shortly before the November 2014 installation of its Euclid system, the firm made another bold investment in digital technology when it became one of the first in the U.S. to install an HP Indigo 30000 sheet-fed digital press. Built to accept a 29.5 x 20.9-inch sheet size, the HP Indigo 30000 brings the same wide-format capability to sheet-fed carton converting that the HP Indigo 20000 brings to roll-fed flexible film converting. Possessing as it does both the HP Indigo 30000 sheet-fed digital press and the Highcon digital carton finishing system, Boutwell Owens is in the catbird’s seat when it comes to fast turnaround/short run carton converting.

Though the two digital machines sit side by side in a specially built room—air conditioning, moisture and humidity control, newly poured cement floor—there is no attempt at linking them in a continuous in-line print-to-finishing work flow. “In fact,” says Hodges, “we use the Highcon for cartons printed on our conventional offset presses when a run is short, thus saving the customer the cost of tooling a die.”

Brave new world
It should be pointed out that certain challenges come with this brave new world of digital manufacturing. Figuring out an appropriate pricing structure is among them.

“We did the math on the number of jobs it was going to take to generate the necessary revenue through these digital systems,” says Vice President of Operations Bill Lorenz. “What you have to keep in mind is that these are all going to be smaller jobs that go through the digital workflow. A smaller number of sheets, regardless of what the revenue per sheet is, means less revenue per job compared to the traditional workflow we have in the plant. How do you factor in customer service costs, administrative time, quoting time, and so on when you introduce so many small jobs into your workflow?”

One potential solution is what’s referred to as the digital storefront approach. Lorenz explains.

“If you have a customer with repeat orders, you can load a population of their jobs on a storefront, give them password-protected access to it, and have a pricing structure set up that is job- and volume-specific. They can then put their orders in directly, literally processing their own orders online in such a way that those orders would drop right into our digital workflow in our prepress department. It’s like an accelerated job-booking system. If the customer answers six or seven questions, our internal systems would be able to process these small jobs efficiently, no matter how many there are, without having our internal administrative costs spiral upward under the weight of so many jobs, each of them naturally smaller than the jobs we’re accustomed to running on our traditional offset presses.”

Hodges adds that HP Indigo 30000also has some ideas on how to optimize this process, as do pre-press specialists like Esko. But he thinks that when it comes to managing work flow in a world of digital manufacturing, most converters are going to be looking to customize it according to the way they themselves do business.

“Plenty of questions are surfacing and some potential solutions are being offered where work flow is concerned,” says Hodges. “But our stance on it is that, in the interest of getting to market as quickly as possible, we’re better off developing our own solutions rather than waiting on the rest of the world to do it for us.”

Perfect customer for digital?
When asked to describe the ideal customer most likely to benefit most often from Boutwell Owens’ new digital capabilities, Hodges says there is no single perfect customer. He also says that while figuring out which customers to target is still a work in progress, two targets are very clear: customers looking to better manage packaging obsolescence and customers seeking ways to keep inventory to a minimum.

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