Digital the door to new opportunities

The pressure’s on. There’s no doubt about that. Converters are faced with a nearly perfect storm of commercial pressures: falling run lengths, faster turnarounds, more competitive pricing, rising costs and tough demands for quality.

Internal efficiencies can take a company only so far but, sooner or later, critical decisions need to be made about investment in new technologies to address production and profitability issues, reverse the trends and grow the business.

Digital printing offers converters these opportunities by enabling cost-effective short-run production of labels, flexible packaging, shrink sleeves and folding carton applications on presses that will integrate smoothly with existing workflows.

Digital printing also enables the development of new revenue streams from market testing and short-runs for product trials.

At present, there are three digital printing technologies available for converters to use: dry toner, liquid toner and inkjet. Each of these is a proven technology, but their use by converters varies, with full-colour inkjet being the most recent in the market – although mono inkjet has been used for imprinting, coding and marking for a long time.

Higher press speeds and a trend toward wider web widths are also driving up the crossover point below which digital production is more cost-effective than conventional, making digital yet more attractive.

New approaches to existing markets

Brand managers like digital printing because it can offer an immediacy and responsiveness that conventional printing often cannot. Refreshing brands to capture consumer attention is a common marketing technique when economies slow, and with full-colour very short-run capabilities, converters can offer new designs targeted at specific regions, retail outlets and consumer types cost-effectively.

Converters with web-to-print solutions can offer label and flexible packaging buyers control of design, run length and deliveries while at the same time providing full visibility of the progress of jobs.

Digital printing can also be used to increase both brand integrity and product security through the use of product codes, 2-D barcodes, batch numbers and even coding that is linked to full-colour images using variable data printing (VDP) capabilities, as well as including other security devices that can be added during the finishing process.

With worldwide counterfeiting of all sorts of products, from clothing and food to pharmaceuticals and aircraft parts continuing to rise*, preventing and detecting counterfeit goods is becoming increasingly important.

End-to-end solutions

Digitally printed products may be finished either with in-line or near-line solutions. At present, the latter is the most common, as digital presses are usually introduced into companies with existing finishing equipment. In many cases, it also makes better economic sense as finishing lines usually run faster than digital presses and the equipment can be used to finish jobs from multiple presses.

However, a significant number of converters with digital operations are opting for in-line finishing, especially now that press speeds are increasing.

At HP, the strategy has always been to provide an end-to-end solution for label converters and there is a network of partners providing prepress, media and finishing products that integrate seamlessly into the workflow of HP Indigo press ws4500s and HP Indigo WS6000 digital presses.

These machines are currently the only ones to support end-to-end label, flexible packaging, shrink sleeve and folding carton production, offering converters opportunities to move beyond their traditional markets.

With 12% of all new press sales to the label market being digital, volumes of digitally printed products of all sorts will continue to increase. Taking the step into digital is becoming easier as the technologies mature and label and flexible packaging buyers become more fully aware of the benefits; and it is a move that can almost certainly relieve some pressure on converters and brand owners.

*The OECD reports (Magnitude of counterfeiting and piracy of tangible products – November 2009 update) that the cost to companies of counterfeiting rose 53% to $250 billion between 2004 and 2007.