General Label boosts productivity

With the addition of a Martin MBSF butt splicer on a new 13” Nilpeter SG3300 press, El Paso, Texas-based General Labels has increased its production throughput by nearly 40 percent.

Jose Gerardo, president of General Labels, said, ‘We needed to increase our hourly throughput and we also wanted to reduce our scrap. There are two sides to that coin­ - one was the elimination of manual roll changes which required us to stop every time we had to change a roll. The other was consistency in our ink lay-down. We’re now running one long continuous run without having to stop. Before we added the Martin, we could only do about 160 thousand pieces with a 10-inch repeat and now we can approach a quarter of a million per day. And we’re doing that with less equipment.’

General Labels is now focusing on longer runs because of the expanded capabilities of this new press supported by the Martin splicer. Instead of stopping every 13,000 or 14,000 feet for a roll change they can now run continuously, and, as Gerardo noted, ‘continuous running delivers much higher quality.’ The company recently purchased an EFI Jetrion digital press to handle its short-run demands.

The majority of General Labels’ products are shipped within the United States. Then in many cases, they are exported to Mexico where they are applied to the end product and repackaged for shipment back into the United States. About 20-25 percent of the company’s products are shipped countries including Japan, Korea and China, where they are added to subcontracted goods and sold worldwide.