Skanem invests in Esko suite

Skanem India managing director Venkatraman Hariharan said: ‘Label manufacturers are increasingly challenged with the growing number of shorter runs, faster cycle times, more SKUs, stricter regulatory compliance requirements, and a mix of conventional and digital printing processes. There is zero margin for error or time loss, and on top of all of this, there continues to be severe margin pressure. In order to address these challenges, there is urgent need to standardize and streamline production flows, taking out as much manual intervention and automating as many repetitive tasks as possible. Implementing standard workflows supported with web-based project management and collaboration tools are essential business improvements as label manufacturers work to stay competitive.’

Automation Engine at Skanem India has layout and job management modules that includespreflighting, trapping, step and repeat, adding marks and control strips. ‘Prepress is often a bottleneck causing delays that affect the entire plant. Doing this work manually creates capacity and throughput problems which we expect to overcome using the Esko suite,’ added Hariharan.

‘The next step in upgrading our pre-press facility would be to integrate Esko suite with automatic quality inspection,’ said Hariharan. ‘We would take our entire process of producing labels into the realm of electronic verification which is a key requirement in the pharmaceutical space. It would ensure a very high degree of accuracy for other customers as well.’

Talking of developments at Skanem plants in Europe, Hariharan added: ‘Digitalization has been in the forefront for the Skanem Group and an optimized process based on Esko is being rolled out in Europe. It will cover a combination of Esko packages including Automation Engine, Imagine Engine, WebCenter and a lot of different tools.’