Scotland’s KennedySmith moves to digitally printed cartons

Packaging Solutions

Irvine, West of Scotland, folding carton producer KennedySmith Press Ltd has installed its first digital press in the shape of a Xeikon CX500 to run alongside its B1 litho printing equipment.

Director of KennedySmith, Michiel Molenaar, explained the reasoning behind the installation: ‘An analysis of our productivity has highlighted the amount of smaller format jobs that we were printing multi-up on our B1 litho presses. They were taking longer to make ready than to actually print, meaning that they were less profitable than we would like. We decided that this could be the ideal time to take a serious look at digital – the process typically offers virtually zero makeready, though on a smaller format substrate.

‘Having examined a number of possible suppliers, Xeikon seemed to offer us the ideal solution, in terms of substrates available, colour capabilities, performance, and, of course, price.’

Has the introduction of the new technology been a success? ‘Yes, in the main it has been very successful, though we are certain that there is still room for more improvements from our application of the technology. The quality is great, and, most importantly, it has been accepted by our customers. We are still learning the true potential of the machine, and working through which jobs are the best ones to move across to digital, but we now see the technology as something suitable to work alongside litho.

‘We started printing on the Xeikon towards the end of 2023, and the re-training of our litho press operators is still on-going to a degree, but with regard to the work produced it has been very successful. The operators are still learning, of course, but if they come across an issue that they have not seen before, there is always somebody on the end of the phone for us to speak to at Xeikon.’ Indeed, Michiel has been delighted by the support offered by the supplier, both technically and operationally, even though Xeikon is still on a learning curve itself with regard to packaging production.

There have even been a few pleasant surprises along the way for Michiel and his team: ‘We produce a lot of packaging for a Swiss company that specialise in herbal products, with the finished packs going out across the world. We used to get colour corrections from people in Australia, then more tweaks – sometimes conflicting – from somebody in Canada. With digital files going straight to press, we can simply say that you will get back what you send to us.’

With regard to the big advantages of digital, the potential of producing security components on pharmaceutical packaging can cross into the area generally recognised as personalisation: ‘We are currently talking to one of our customers about adding ‘best before date’ information to their cartons. With others we are looking to produce numbered packs for security, as well as integrating other security features.

‘Our shorter runs on the Xeikon are usually about 2500 cut sheets, but we also handle longer runs that equate to 15,000 sheets once we have cut the work from the continuous feed.’ Both a coating unit and a real sheeter have been added to the print engine.

‘We are certainly not disappointed that we have made the move into digital. In most regards it has met our expectations,’ added Michiel. The company is currently running a single day shift on the Xeikon, whereas they would normally be operating a double day shift both on the litho presses and the finishing equipment. ‘We see ourselves moving forward to the longer working day with the digital press shortly, once we have moved more jobs in that direction.’

KennedySmith considers itself to be a smaller, but more flexible, folding carton operation within the UK packaging printing market. ‘We are not like the big groups. We can be very flexible – if a customer comes to us with an urgent job, we are agile enough to be able to adjust our machine loading to accommodate such work,’ concluded Michiel.