In Line with Your Printing Needs

Kassandra Kania, Managing Editor

In an effort to reduce inventory costs and increase flexibility, some companies are choosing the use of in-line printing over off-line printing or purchasing preprinted materials. But in-line printing is not always feasible for every application. Before switching to in-line printing, companies should consider a variety of factors, including the number and type of products they are packaging, the length of their runs, and the information they need to print on the package.

Determining print goals will also help companies decide what type of technology is most suitable for their application: Do you need to print in more than one color? Will you be printing a lot of customized graphics? Do you need to make changes on the fly? The answers to these types of questions helped some of the manufacturers mentioned in this article choose systems that best suited their printing needs.

FROM OFF-LINE TO IN-LINE

There are many driving forces for choosing in-line over off-line printing, says Jim Umbdenstock, president, Griffin-Rutgers Company, Inc. (Ronkonkoma, NY). For instance, "If you are running multiple products, that's when you would look at in-line printing," he says. Cost is an important factor to consider when choosing between in-line and off-line printing. "Once you have the preprinted inventory, you've paid for it already before you use it. There is going to be a higher cost," says Umbdenstock.

Jack Moyle, OEM sales manager for Adolph Gottscho, concurs. "The impetus for change is a matter of simple economics," he says. "The initial difference in material cost—printed versus unprinted substrate—can be as high as 50%. Indirect, yet very real, savings accrue from reduced inventories—stocking a single generic web stock for multiple products." Less warehouse commitment and improved cash flow complete the savings, Moyle says.

Sterion Inc. (Ham Lake, MN), a manufacturer of specialty products for medical and surgical applications, was purchasing Tyvek pouches from Tolas Health Care Packaging (Feasterville, PA) to package a variety of its products. Information was then printed off-line onto a label, using a laser printer, and applied to the pouch. In an effort to reduce costs and increase flexibility, the company invested in a thermal-transfer printer from Quick Label Systems (West Warwick, RI) and began printing directly onto pouches on a roll from Tolas Health Care Packaging. As Leslie Love, director of sales and marketing, explains, Tolas had to modify its equipment so that rather than shear-cutting the pouches at the end of the line, they would be wound up into rolls. "Tolas was involved in a joint development with Quick Label Systems to develop a solution for a customer who packages many different size surgical blades and had a desire to reduce pouch inventory and printing plate costs" she relates. "This customer's need was the driving force behind our pouches-on-a-roll program."

Sterion chose Quick Label's QLS 3000 printer with a cutter/stacker accessory. "Companies, especially in the medical industry, may need to customize a label for an export market or change a label to suit a new product specification or some sort of change that's required by FDA regulations," says Eric Pizzuti, national sales manager for Quick Label. "This digital printing system allows customers to make product changes and print the precise number of pouches that they need for the amount of product they are producing at any given time. That eliminates the need to stock preprinted pouches and avoids human error involved in labeling."

The application of printed labels can also interfere with the effectiveness of Tyvek, according to Love. "Replacing a label with graphics printed directly on the package allows for optimum porosity of the Tyvek. This can be especially important for smaller size packages where a large percentage of the Tyvek portion of the package may have been covered by the label."

The Quick Label printer was integrated with a machine developed by NACS Inc. (Isanti, MN) to automate the filling and sealing of the pouches once they were printed. "The machine takes the pouches on a roll, slits the top layer so [the product] can be inserted, and then positions it for loading," explains Bill Doty, president. Once the product is loaded, the pouch is sealed and separated from the web. NACS is working with Quick Label to integrate the two machines for sale to other companies. "The combination of the two machines will yield a flexible solution," says Doty.

Today, Sterion has four Quick Label printers. "We run every printed pouch through our quick label printers," says Fred Berg, Sterion's vice president of marketing. "We have more flexibility and are able to cut our costs with the [reduction in the] number of labels that we were applying on the pouch itself." Automating the entire operation has also helped to reduce labor. "We went from 12 people doing everything by hand to one person operating the machine," says Berg.

WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE

Another factor to consider when weighing in-line printing is whether or not your product is going to be exported to other countries. "Language comes into play on the international scene," says Umbdenstock. "Countries that used to receive products with multiple languages on them now want their own. So if you're producing aspirin, but you're shipping to 12 different countries that [each] want their own language, then you're going to do short runs and change the print to another language."

The challenge of printing a variety of languages was the impetus for Organon Inc. (West Orange, NJ), a pharmaceutical firm, to switch from preprinted blister web stock to in-line printing for a new medical device. "The medical instrument in the package was made in Switzerland and then shipped to various countries," explains Mike Shaw, vice president and co-owner, Nutec Inc. (Lawrenceville, NJ). "The switch [to in-line printing] was due to the costly nature of stocking a number of different languages. The company wanted to ship blank packages to the United States and have them printed here in English." Nutec provided Organon with a complete system for denesting and conveying the blister packs. The entire top paper web of the package is then printed using Nutec's thermal ink-jet system with a Hewlett-Packard cartridge. After the web is printed, it passes through a camera inspection system and then enters a cartoner.

"The HP technology uses a disposable print head system," says Shaw, "so when you use the ink up and throw the cartridge away, you get a brand new print head with the new cartridge. So there's literally no maintenance at all with our system." Other advantages include high speed (the HP thermal ink-jet printer prints up to 500 ft/min) and the use of environmentally friendly water-based inks in place of solvents or volatile cleaning solutions. Also, the entire print job was done using a bit-map image format. "This was done partly for Part 11 compliance so no one can alter any part of the image or text," explains Shaw.

THERMAL OR FLEXO?

Ed Chabot, product manager for Markem Corp. (Keene, NH), says that more and more companies are starting to realize the savings of using a thermal-transfer printer. "[Packaging] will still be preprinted to some degree, but companies will leave the variable information off and use one of these printers to print in real time."

Aspen Surgical Products Inc. (Grand Rapids, MI) is using Markem's SmartDate thermal-transfer printer to apply date and lot codes to pouches used to package Richard-Allan surgical needles. All of the information, including the company name, product type, and reorder number, is printed directly onto the Tyvek of the inner pouch, which is then placed in a larger pouch. "The thermal-transfer printer gives you a nice, clear image with repeatability," says Jeff Harnden, Aspen's production engineer. "Also, we need to be able to print several hundred different item numbers, and we can do that with the push of a button."

More and more customers are using this type of printer, says Chabot. "Many of the packaging lines now are controlled by computers, and having an intelligent printer is just a natural extension to their production process."

Bell-Mark (Pine Brook, NJ) manufactures both flexographic and thermal-transfer printers. "With our thermal printer, we can print all the variables," says Glenn C. Breslauer, director of marketing. The EasyPrint II MLP has a 5-in. print head that traverses across the web and prints, in one pass, all the information that is required. "We do all the bar coding, lot expiration coding, two-dimensional bar codes, symbols, logos, the contents of the package, and directions, like the peel edge—all this can be done in one pass by our thermal print head," says Breslauer. But, "if you're running a whole line of the same product and everything needs to be coded with the same number and dates and content, a flexo machine might be the best machine for the application," he adds.

Another factor that may influence a company's decision about whether to buy a thermal-transfer or flexographic printer is color. "In-line printing has been around a long time in the medical industry," says Greg Rochon, president of Greydon (York, PA), "but a couple of things are changing. One of the things is that people want more than one color on the package. They're identifying the product in the hospital by color coding, so two-color printing has become an issue. You can always do a second color by having a thermal-transfer printer with a colored ribbon, but if all you're using it for is color when you don't need programmability, then a two-color flexographic printer is cheaper to operate and allows you to have two colors," he says.

The number of printing applications required will also help determine whether flexographic or thermal printing is more suitable. "If the customer has 30 different rollstock printing applications, it is much better off using the flexographic printer because having 30 print plates is not expensive. But if the same company has 500 applications, then it needs to use a printer that has some programmability," Rochon says.

It may also pay to invest in both thermal-transfer and flexographic printing technologies. "Many of the medical companies have a secondary printer on the rollstock machine to print the variable information so they don't have to have so many print plates," says Rochon.

FUTURE TRENDS

Some companies are awaiting FDA's proposed bar code rule before deciding what printing technology to invest in. "The determination about which bar code should be the standard for the industry will affect a lot of the printing," says Dean Hornsby, director of new products and applications, Matthews International (Pittsburgh). "One issue will be real estate size—where you can print the bar code—and another will be how fast you can print that bar code. So, that could affect throughput rates as well."

"The pharmaceutical, medical, and OTC industries are all waiting to see what will happen," says Griffin's Umbdenstock. "I think there is a bit of hesitation across the board at this time in the marketplace. Companies will run with what they have right now, awaiting this directive, which has been postponed until next year."

Another factor that may result in some companies exploring new printing technologies in the future is the concern about counterfeit products and product divergence. Matthews International has teamed up with Biocode (Bethlehem, PA) to develop an ink for ink-jet printers that contains a unique signature. "The signature in the ink cannot be duplicated or reverse engineered," says Hornsby. Products can also be traced using printed codes—such as bar codes or overt marks—that are part of a track-and-trace info-centric software system. "The end goal is that you can track the movement of the unit through each point in the distribution chain, which gives you tighter control."

Companies will continue to see all aspects of packaging—including printing—affected by these concerns and more. Thankfully, improvements in existing printing technologies and the introduction of new ones will give companies a variety of options to choose from.