Cover Story?UV Flexo Printing is Opening Doors to Success

A 10-color press with UV capability has provided QC Packaging Systems with the tools it needs for high-quality work.

by Tom Polischuk

Growing pains! That's a problem most companies would just love to have right now. For QC Corporation, it's a good hurt.

QC Corporation is a major North American manufacturer of bulk and consumer entertainment media products for brands such as Memorex, Fuji, Maxell, Sony, JVC, Kodak, and Radio Shack. The company has experienced a high growth cycle over the past three years due to the explosion of demand for optical media, such as CD/CDRs, DVDs, and DVD-Rs.

This business growth came at a time when QC's customers were demanding shorter and shorter lead times, while the lead times for its paperboard packaging supplies were lengthening. The company found itself stockpiling printing and packaging products, sometimes as much as six months worth.

In a business environment driven by such concepts as lean manufacturing, six sigma, just-in-time, and supply-chain management, QC's owner, Bill Blyth, knew that increased work-in-process and finished-goods inventories were not viable long-term solutions. In the company's continual efforts to find innovative solutions to support its growth and manage its supply chain, Blyth decided to establish a package printing operation that would support the needed supply-chain optimization efforts.

Since it was clear that this new operation would need to generate more business than just the internal needs of QC Corp., Blyth decided to establish a completely independent company—one that could flourish and grow in the open market in its own right. He partnered with industry veterans Bill McKnight (managing partner), Hugh Cleveland (director of operations), and David Franze (director of manufacturing) to create a lean, state-of-the-art company called QC Packaging Systems, Inc. (QCP), located in Mississauga, Ontario.

With extensive experience in the folding carton and printing industries and an entrepreneurial spirit, McKnight, Cleveland, and Franze envisioned a high-quality, lean manufacturing operation with leading-edge equipment that could offer value-added options to its customers. The business model was centered on fast turnaround and low overhead, with resulting lower costs for its customers.

Starting from scratch

One of the benefits of opening a brand new facility is that it is not encumbered by many of the constraints faced by existing operations. QCP took full advantage of this opportunity and the result was a very successful startup.

The company began by gutting a 50,000-square-foot building and incorporating an equipment layout that was designed to minimize material flow and provide an open view of the entire shop floor. Air conditioning was also installed to provide a controlled work environment for personnel and materials.

The facility includes some of the latest printing and diecutting technologies, with on-site support teams that Franze says "rival most multi-national folding carton producers." A 10-color, inline UV press is the centerpiece of the operation and is capable of printing any combination of front or back in one pass, along with inline embossed diecutting and foil and holographic laminations. Additionally, the press has a digital color monitoring, error detection, and barcode-grading unit from BST Promark that is used to ensure 100 percent quality throughput.

Support systems include a graphics department with the latest Macintosh computers that can handle full graphic design from concept to completion; an in-house satellite prepress station maintained by Southern Graphics to manage graphic files, pre-flight art work, and ensure communication throughout the workflow; and a structural design department with CAD systems connected to the latest Graphtec sample plotter. A state-of-the-art ink room is run and managed by Ink Management Solutions (IMS), a company devoted to in-depth ink room management.

The press was ordered in November of 2002, and by April 2003 QC Packaging was ready for action. The press was in production just eight days after its initial delivery. Four weeks later, a second shift was added, and the company is currently in active pursuit of a second press.

Market opportunities

With its family roots firmly in the media sector, this market will continue to be a key part of QCP's business mix. However, McKnight says that as an independent company, its focus will be on opportunities in other business segments. "Key markets for QCP will be high-end, high-value-added packaging for the food, pharmaceutical, and health care industry sectors."

UV printing capability is a major factor in QCP's ability to enter into these markets, according to Franze. "While inline flexo has given us the advantages of single-pass production, which offers lower costs and faster response to our customers, UV has offered us the opportunity go to the market and not worry about the graphics we will have to print," he states. "We can take the most challenging jobs, which we would never even consider if we had a water-based press, and print it with confidence … Our customers are able to have their jobs produced faster, with better color consistency, and a host of additional value-added features inline, such as foil laminations and specialty coatings, all of which require UV."

QCP prints on materials that include SBS, 100-lb. paper stock, and other substrates from 4 to 28 pt. Stora Enso and other local suppliers provide these substrates. QCP's ink supplier is SICPA, whose high level of support, according to Franze, is only enhanced by the location of its Canadian office, production, and R&D facility just 45 minutes from QCP.

UV printing advantages

Franze is sold on the advantages that UV printing brings to the picture. "UV is 100 percent more reliable to run than other inking systems," he says. "It is no surprise to walk into a water-based flexo printing plant, smell the amines in the air, and watch the press operators add a continuous concoction of extenders, pH stabilizers, antifoam agents, etc. throughout a run. With UV, once we have standardized an ink formulation for a job, the ink remains the same from run to run, batch to batch, and no press-side agents are mixed."

This stability of the UV ink system was a big help during startup of the press. "With the startup of any press," says Franze, "there is the usual fingerprinting of the press, and determining the best combination of aniloxes, plates, and ink formulations." But because the UV ink remains constant, Franze said that they were in a much better position to test different ink formulations to determine the best fit.

"One thing that did cause us a bit of time during our startup was determining the type of ink we were going to use. Because the press is capable of such a large range of inks, it took a bit more time to fine tune the process than if we had a normal chambered inking system. However, the extra time was well worth it, as we now have a larger range of inks and formulations to choose from, and therefore, it doesn't limit our choices or our customers choices."

The cost of UV printing is a topic that always comes up, acknowledges Cleveland, since UV inks can be three or more times more costly to acquire than water-based inks. But he says that a printer must consider the total applied cost, and he feels that this is where UV printing comes up a winner.

"UV inking systems obtain much higher densities with thinner ink films, and they sit on top of the substrate and don't dive into the substrate like water-based and solvent inks," says Cleveland. "Therefore we are able to achieve much better contrast, densities, and vividness of graphics with less ink."

When you throw in all the issues involved with processing and maintaining water-based ink systems (pH and viscosity control, ink additives, clean up, wasted inks, work-off inks with unknown additives and ink strengths, etc.), Cleveland clearly feels the scales lean toward UV systems.

"Total applied costs for a UV inking system is less, and far superior to conventional inking systems," he states. "If a converter is serious about producing the highest quality product, and can see past a narrow-minded view of direct costs versus total applied costs of converting, then they have graduated to world-class printing with UV."

Market successes

The high quality levels from UV printing, along with value-added features such as high-end paste UV metallic inks, UV high-gloss and matte coatings, and foil stamping/lamination inline, have been critical to QCP's success in the markets it is in. They have also opened the door to new customers.

"These capabilities allowed us to land a Christmas promotion job for Dare foods, in that they wanted their festive collection of crackers to jump off the shelf," says McKnight. "We added embossing, gold inks, and gold foil to make the carton stand out from its competition. Due to the success of this project, we are now working on several other specialty projects with Dare."

McKnight, however, doesn't get too wrapped up in any technology, no matter how good it is. "We never want to lose focus on leading-edge technology," he cautions. "We are not going to choose UV flexo simply because we have UV flexo now. Offering our customers the highest quality products at a competitive price with shorter lead times is our focus…not UV flexo!"