Eurostampa NA meets label-printing cleanup demands with Flexo Wash system upgrade
Eurostampa is an international company based in Italy with five locations worldwide. It prints labels for very popular luxury brands of wine, spirits, champagne, food and chocolate. The company's North American plant in Cincinnati, OH, is an innovative modern production facility, “equipped with highly competitive machines to print high-quality labels”. At this facility alone, Eurostampa produces more than 2 billion labels per year.
Simply put: that’s a lot of printing. A lot of labels. A lot of cleanup.
Ryan Malott, plate-mounting supervisor at Eurostampa North America, noted that six years ago, press parts were cleaned with a small parts cleaner that fit on top of a 55-gal drum. Slowly the company added small Flexo Wash Parts Washers as it began to grow.
Before the Flexo Wash cleaning system, one person per shift was in charge of parts cleaning. They would spend time before and after pre-washing parts, loading pans into whatever parts washers were free and then manually wash them again afterwards.
Eurostampa added a Flexo Wash Eco Midi, which is a smaller Parts Washer. This worked fine until production ramped up and so did the cleaning of the parts. With this machine, they could clean only four pans, and much more capacity was needed. Malott says, “Our previous FW Parts Washers were great, but as always machines wear out. That along with a great increase in flexo presses had us needing to look at our other processes to be able to keep up with the demand.”
Time for an Upgrade
In the last year, Eurostampa North America added two additional flexo presses, which increased production significantly. It decided to purchase a new Flexo Wash PK 200 WR TrolleyLoad after noticing a lot of bottlenecking in the cleaning process. The upgrade to a bigger machine “was a must —with lines of parts waiting to be cleaned, and we could not keep up,” according to Malott.
With an upgrade to this much larger Parts Washer, the printer has tripled the number of parts they can clean and throughput has increased 150%. They have increased from cleaning four pans to 10 pans. It has greatly improved the offline cleaning process. Now the process is “lightly prewashing to get excess ink removed, then loading up to 10 pans, then to drying off the parts after the cleaning cycle. We were able to completely eliminate an entire step. In turn, it improved production on the press-side because we no longer are having presses down waiting for press parts to be cleaned.”
Saving two hours of cleaning time each shift
More importantly, the employees are spending much less time cleaning, saving about two hours EACH SHIFT. All the shifts like using this machine because of the comprehensive cleaning and the improved ergonomics because you no longer are reaching into the machine to put in or pull-out parts. The TrolleyLoad option is great for transport and basic implementation of all parts.
Another big element in time-saving is the fact that this Parts Washer has a 45-gal tank, as compared to the 8-gal tank their last parts washer had. This means longer time between changing and replenishing cleaning solutions and saved time in cleaning processes.
Return on Investment
Eurostampa North America went from waiting on machines to now the machines are waiting on parts to clean. Production is no longer held up by longer cleaning processes.
Eurostampa North America uses Flexo Wash parts washers because “FW understands what is needed, you have many years of knowledge trying to understand what works best." From Malott’s experience of watching the evolution and improvements made from upgrading from the FW Eco Midi to the PK TrolleyLoad, he states that Flexo Wash is “simply continuously improving the machines.”
There is no doubt that the return on investment is a definite. Considering Eurostampa doubled output in just a few days after installing the new machine, this is a successful investment.