Femalabel doubles capacity with two Xeikon CX3 digital label presses

The company started working with Xeikon in 2012, when a Xeikon 3300 and Xeikon 3030Plus were installed. Since then, the demand for even more capacity has only increased, so recently Femalabel decided to upgrade to two Xeikon CX3 presses from Xeikon’s Cheetah portfolio.

Wim Feys, chief technology officer at Femalabel, said: ‘We face an increasing demand for specialty products and variable print. That is why we had to dramatically increase our capacity. In addition, many of our customers want their labels to be printed on PE. With the Xeikon CX3 we have found the perfect solution to answer this demand, with the same high quality on all the required substrates.’

One of Femalabel’s specialties is the production of multi-layer labels. ‘The production of multi-layer labels requires a higher volume than regular labels,’ added Feys. ‘This means we need more output and makes production at a constant speed even more important.’

Femalabel has also noticed an increase in the demand for printing variable information on labels, so aside from printing speed, also data processing capabilities are important. ‘The developers at Xeikon know that data processing could be a potential bottleneck in the production so they spent a great deal of attending to that in the development in of the Xeikon X-800 digital front end and workflow. The X-800 contributes greatly to consistent production speed and capacity increase. We print a lot of barcodes, QR codes and number combinations on labels. The data processing is done 20 percent faster with the X-800 from Xeikon as compared to competitive systems.’

Next to digital printing, Femalabel uses UV offset technology. ‘For the bigger volumes, we need the UV offset technology, and we choose the technology that provides high quality comparable to what we can achieve on our Xeikon presses. With most printers it’s the other way around; they are simply surprised by the quality of their digital label press because it is higher than that of their flexo equipment,’ concluded Feys.