French print house 5 Sept Etiquette has cut costs, increased productivity and reduced waste after investing n five AVT Helios systems for its presses and finishing solutions.
The company manufactures rolls of adhesive labels for the food, cosmetics, wine and spirits industries. It also works with customers in the chemical, paint, household, tooling and fertiliser sectors. It provides offset, flexography, screen and digital services, and holds Imprim’Vert, FSC, ISO 9001: 2015 and UNFEA Qualetiq accreditations. With a turnover of 10.6 millions Euros, the 76-strong company handles six million square metres of adhesive substrate per year, and prints more than a billion labels.
The AVT Helios Print Inspection System is designed exclusively for labels and narrow web printing. It offers 100% quality assurance across the entire print production workflow – from set-up through printing to finishing – inspecting any application and any substrate or print type.
5 Sept Etiquette’s business model is based on error-free production and avoiding the huge financial and environmental costs incurred by waste. However, with clients increasingly requesting changes to label orders, errors began to creep in. The resulting waste was eating into profits and undermined the company’s commitment to sustainable production.
‘In our line of work, accuracy is everything,’ said Patrick Wack, CEO. ‘An error in the food label ingredients, or regarding the allergens or batch reference, could have major repercussions for our customers. Having to correct errors meant we were producing more labels than the customer ordered, and this waste was impacting profits.’
The company also wanted to ensure consistent print quality between each run of the same product, between the different options of the same product, and between different operators. The lack of visibility across the whole production run was another issue that 5 Sept Etiquette wanted to address. Being able to visualise the entire production run, not just sample sets, would make it easier to detect defects that appear and disappear throughout the run.
Initially, the company installed two Helios II vision systems on its offset presses to control print quality. Then the company added two Helios II systems to its flexographic presses to increase productivity and connect all presses to the centralised database for reference control.
Last year, it achieved 100% automation across its entire production. The company can now correct defects on the press as soon as possible, reduce waste and clean the coils from non-conformities. The AVT print inspection and production workflow solutions have become inseparable elements in 5 Sept Etiquette ‘s print architecture, enabling it to oversee and control all production elements.
