Late year visit projects Australian expansion for AVT

On his regular year-end visit to Australia recently, Rony Shmulevitch, sales and marketing director, Asia, for Israel-headquartered inspection technology supplier AVT, foreshadowed the need for more automation in the local packaging and labeling market.

He stressed that the regularity of his visits over the past four years has contributed to AVT’s progress since the appointment of DES as its distribution agent.

‘We can see the fruits of this close relationship in terms of the progress we have been able to make in the marketplace,’ he stated.

Shmulevitch attributes much of the group’s success in the local packaging market to the fact that the industry has embraced European standards, which he noted ‘is not the case in Asia’.

A further factor has been AVT’s progress in the labeling market. Shmulevitch said: ‘From hardly being represented in it, labeling has become a major part of our Australian business and yet there is still the need for a lot of education.’

Emphasizing the packaging industry’s trend toward ever greater automation, he pointed to the need for further automating processes, not only of the equipment being used but for making the entire process more user friendly for both operator and the entire workflow. ‘These are needs we have been pursuing for quite some time - how to use the equipment better, how to shorten set-up time,’ he pointed out.

One of the areas which the AVT executive nominated as needing greater workflow efficiency is in the finishing processes of carton production runs. With constant calls for higher quality output, how to inspect the finished product more efficiently is being closely examined but, noted Shmulevitch, ‘we’re not there yet’.

Meanwhile, the director of sales for labels and packaging at DES, Russell Robertson, revealed that the first of two installations are expected to be completed in the next two months of the new Workflow Link for the narrow web market which picks up defects on press and allows offline editing of the recorded file. This then allows the rewinders and finishing units to run at full speed without the need for a second camera.  

Click here for more stories about AVT on L&L.com.