FEATURE Coding, Marking & Labelling
Green Partners reaps rewards with Rotech direct carton printing
G
reen Partners, Europe’s largest supplier of cut fl owers and bouquets in Europe, has reduced its annual carton
printing costs by £48,000 by switching from hand labelling to Rotech’s direct carton printers. “The cost-savings have been signifi cant,” said John Berry, Operations Manager at Green Partners. “A price-per-print study was recently carried out in Holland where they use the same printers and it worked out at 2.6p per thousand prints”. From their UK facilities in Spalding, Lincolnshire, Green Partners processes and distributes over 1.6 million boxes of fl owers each year to supermarket chains throughout the UK. Flowers are prepared and carefully wrapped by hand before being placed in buckets, which are then boxed, ready for shipping, allowing retailers to simply lift a bucket full of fl owers out of the box and place it directly onto the display stand.
Labelling boxes The process of applying outer labels to packed boxes of fl owers was also previously done by hand, however, it
Seiko X72 printhead and reservoir
was ineffi cient and increasingly costly. The labels were being printed by desktop printers which are expensive to repair, adding to costs of the labels, printer ribbons and maintenance. More than one person would label boxes – to print the labels and apply them, adding to labour costs. Equally, hand applying an average of 28,000 labels per week, which during peak seasons such as Christmas and Mother’s Day would increase to 72,000 labels, was labour-intensive. This led to Green Partners seeking a
cost-eff ective solution, which would also easily integrate with its production lines. UK coding and marking specialist, Rotech Machines, was contacted by Green Partners’s Berry, who was interested in its large-area printers following a previous successful installation in Holland. Buckets travel along fi ve diff erent low-line conveyors, allowing operators to insert fl owers. These buckets are then manually placed in boxes which travel past a strapping machine before labels are applied.
The ideal solution for Green Partners meant fi tting a large area printer per line, to print information directly onto the box prior to its strapping.
Rotech installed a Seiko X72 printer, which, based on latest printhead technology, applies high-resolution, large-area prints directly onto any porous surface such as cardboard, paper or wood. X72’s unique Freefl ow technology enables the printhead to draw ink from the main tank, and to consistently apply high-quality prints to areas of up to 72mm in height at speeds of up to 45 metres per minute.
One of the many benefi ts of the large-
automationmagazine.co.uk Automation | December/January 2021 15
area Seiko printers is that they can slot very easily onto existing conveyor lines. As a manufacturer of coding and marking systems, Rotech was able to produce simple, fully-adjustable frames to affi x each printer directly onto each line, allowing users to easily adjust the printer height or position as required. Each printer also comes with its own 20” full-colour Windows OS touchscreen controller which easily integrates with the company’s ERP system, allowing it to schedule line runs and print information so that the entire process is automated.
Cost savings Green Partners has made signifi cant savings across a number of areas. Since installing the X72 printers less than a year ago, it saved around £2,000 on printheads and maintenance alone, where £1,000 was previously spent on labels and around £45,000 on labour costs.
“The simplicity of the units has been the key point, and the ease of integration made it possible to move and run in everyday production. When we recently moved to our new premises, it was made simpler due to the simple framework that allowed us to quickly continue production,” said Berry. Now, Green Partners has no downtime – it simply fi lls the ink tanks as required (indicated by the printer controller), whilst the printer is still printing. Since then, Green Partners has installed two more X72 printers, bringing its total to seven.
CONTACT:
Rotech Machines Ltd
www.rotechmachines.com
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