Philips Lighting Streamlines its Packaging Production by Investing in Inkjet

Philips Lighting, the world's leading lighting manufacturer and part of the global consumer electronics firm Philips, has streamlined one of its fluorescent tube production lines in Roosendaal (the Netherlands), reduced costs and lowered product lead-times, by investing in a full colour, two stage inkjet packaging print solution. The solution incorporates two fully customised HSAJet printing machines, developed by Danish machine manufacturer HS Automatic, incorporating Xaar's XJ126 and XJ500 printheads.

Producing many millions of fluorescent tubes in Europe a year at its manufacturing facilities in the Netherlands, France and Poland, Philips Lighting was looking for a flexible printing solution that would enable it to print bar codes, customer logos, images and marketing materials onto its product packaging. In addition, Philips wanted a solution that would allow advertising campaign materials and co-branding, as well as regularly being able to change packaging designs at short notice and without incurring additional printing costs.

Prior to installing the two HSAjet inkjet printers, Philips Lighting was reliant on outsourcing its printed label requirements for its packaging materials. Project leader for the printer module, Christiaan van Nielen adds, 'Finding a direct printing solution capable of printing variable data on-demand was crucial to our worldwide business (95% of it is European and the rest worldwide) because we have many languages to consider when it comes to labeling our packaging. In addition, with a broad customer base including leading luminaire manufacturers and worldwide active wholesalers, we need to offer the ability to print a variety of brands and marketing campaigns directly on the packaging. Therefore, finding a full colour print-on-demand solution was one of our key objectives, together with cost and the speed of production.'