Automation for the carton converting and packaging process

Technicon’s Rajeev Gandotra said to us months ago, that his company is entering packaging and would show its first developments at the Printpack show. At Printpack it has brought its new INVERTicon carton batch inverter and its CARTONist carton packer which are meant as efficient gathering and packaging devices to be put at the end of folder gluers for crash-lock and lock bottom folding cartons. In most converting workflows for these types of cartons, the fast throughput of the folder-gluer is limited by the inability to efficiently collect the cartons in a compact stack and then put them into the transport carton.

The INVERTicon inverts batches of cartons so that a level stack is produced without this being done by a person standing at the end of the folder gluer. The compact and level stacks can be produced at speeds up to 75,000 cartons an hour by automatically inverting cartons at a user-specified number or interval. The next inline machine, the CARTONist allows ergonomic filling of the with the compact stack from the previous steps, and then automatically closes the carton and automatically tape seals the top and bottom and then applies a transport track and trace label in the last step.

The machines being shown at Printpack are worth a look for high volume carton printers and converters since their folder-gluer are generally the fastest machines in their workflow and the manual labor to gather and make compact stacks can generally never keep up. This seems like a plausible and useful piece of automation that can reduce tedious labor and manual handling, enabling converters to run their folder-gluers at much higher speeds.

Also at the Technicon stand at the show (Technicon is mainly recognized by the industry as a newspaper mailroom automation supplier) was Erich Midlik, the executive vice president of Prime UV the curing systems company. Midlik’s company helped pioneered the use of UV curing of color supplements printed on newspaper web offset presses. These were and are used to produce higher saturation print on smoother substrates such as glazed newsprint and light weight coated papers.   

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.

The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.

Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.

As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.

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