Page 57 - Print 21 Magazine Sep-Oct 2018

Labels & pPacakgaegtinag
FPLMA Awards winners 2018
Graham Kirk, founder and owner of Australasia’s largest flexo platemaking business, was sole recipient of the 2018 Hall of Fame at the FPLMA awards ceremony. Kirk Group now has 120 staff across four locations.
Serial FPLMA award winners RollsPack and Multi-Color Australia took out the Flexo and Labels Best In Show awards respectively
at this year's awards.Both companies
in fact won four Golds, presented at
a glittering ceremony at the Metropolis on Melbourne’s Southbank.
Label House also won four Golds, two each on Flexo Labels and Offset categories. Andrew Kohn won two
Flexo Wide Web Golds, with Visy and Wedderburn Lables each also winning Gold.
Apprentice of the Year was Callum Bryant from Labelmakers in WA, who made the journey across the country
to collect his award, with all five finalists taking part in the event.
From top:
Hall of Fame: Graham Kirk (left) with FPLMA president Mark Easton
Apprentice of Year Callum Bryant (right) from Label Makers WA, with the four other finalists
Best in Show for Flexo winner: Phillip Rolls (left), RollsPack, receives the Award from Vince Sedunary, FPLMA
Best in Show Labels winner: Andrew Jones (right) Multi-Color Australia, with Mark Easton, FPLMA president
automation and integration will certainly reduce turnaround times. One delegate gave an example of 400,000 labels that need to be delivered in two days, an impossible task for an overseas supplier, and with the rise of multitudinous
SKUs, and rivalry between major supermarkets needing immediate responses to opposition campaigns, the clear conclusion was that domestic suppliers were going to reap the rewards of increased marketing activity for the brands, made possible by new technology.
Jason Goode, group packaging
and process manager for Simplot Australia - owner of brands such as Birds Eye, John West and Leggo's - said, “Offshore printing is always a risk. For example I requested 1000 different labels for a job recently, there is no way we are going to proof each sheet, but we need to be in close contact with the printer, and we can't do that if they are overseas. And with increased short run quick turnaround and versioning overseas printers will be at an increasing disadvantage.”
Andy Thomas, strategic director at Tarsus revealed that a working party had been established with the aim of developing an accepted certification for narrow web flexo printing for food and beverage products. Called UVFoodSafe the working group comprises press, inks, materials developers.
Thomas says, “The issue with narrow web printing is UV, at present it is not deemed as safe, the food and drink brands will not go near it due to ink migration.
“The opportunity for label, narrow web, printers is huge, especially with
short run, which means that there is space for narrow web printers now, the economics stack up. So the suppliers are working towards developing an authorisation that guarantees UV printing is food safe.”
Scott Thompson from Esko told the delegates that meeting the demands of the market meant digitisation, automation and connectivity. He said, “Customers want high quality, consistent colour, speed to market, they want to use packaging as a marketing tool, and they want to meet legislative and compliance obligations. Digitisation, automation and integration means your dream
of reduced waste, reduced time and increased productivity can become your reality.” Thompson said using the cloud was one of the best ways to optimise production.
The difficulties of communicating the benefits of investing in software were highlighted by Piet Cottenie, director of Hybrid GMS Pacific,
who remarked that while printers could salivate over hardware it was much harder to get them excited over software, but he said that software was the absolute key to operating in the new era. He gave a detailed presentation on its ability to simply and optimise production and paperwork.
Trevor Crowley, general manager for Xeikon ANZ said that the opportunity to integrate and automate already existed. He cited
a UK Xeikon label printer he had visited who produced 176 different label jobs on two printers in one eight hour shift.
Crowley said, “Key drivers of the growth in short run on demand
work are the slew of new and versioned products and legislation. To exploit the growth that we are seeing automation and integration as crucial. We already have MIS and web-to-print, we already have JDF and PDF. In digitising the production process we can measure, understand and improve. We can take action based on measured data and not on gut feeling. We can produce jobs with minimal human involvement, and get to the point where jobs come off the machine with no human touch and the job is invoiced automatically at that point.”
Delegates at the 2018 FPLMA conference were left in no doubt of the direction that the industry is moving in, and that there are tools already available to enable them to capitalise on the opportunities that are emerging. 21
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