Elopak has added AVT’s SpectraLab on-press module to its quality control process in Terneuzen, The Netherlands, following previous installations at plants in Germany and Denmark.
An add-on to AVT’s 100% inspection systems, SpectraLab assures inline colour measurement for colour consistency and repeatability.
The unit measures absolute L.a.b (lab colour space), density, and dot gain measurement. The system ensures consistent colour printing all along the print run according to a brand owner’s original colours. The on-press module supports the highest production speeds and measures colour on a wide variety of substrates, including paper, carton products such as paperboard, and flexible materials.
Elopak manufactures over 13 billion cartons per year for a diverse portfolio of brand owners around the world. Its day-to-day operations entail frequent job changes and, often, design changes within individual jobs. Make-ready procedures need to be fast and accurate, and colours must precisely match those defined by brand owner graphics. Not only must colours be tightly consistent within print runs, but also repeatable between jobs and repeat runs.
Meeting this need for tight quality control at high speeds, the unit ensures print runs ‘by the numbers,’ meaning it continuously monitors ink densities to verify that presses are printing within prescribed tolerances.
Along with the module’s other benefits, this make ready support feature saves time and costly press stops. The system also includes enhanced colour reporting capabilities, and immediately alerts operators when colours shift out of tolerance. SpectraLab supports any common file standards and communicates easily with third-party reporting systems and databases.
Maurice Wierckx, process improvement engineer, said, ‘The changes that AVT made in getting SpectraLab to fit into our daily production processes have been very well received, and its close collaboration throughout the implementation and evaluation process displayed a true customer partnership. The semi-automated colorbar enables the operator to set up the system in a very short time without any loss on job make-ready. By adding SpectraLab’s database into our Business Intelligence Dashboards, which are used in our daily production meetings, we are able to monitor and detect any changes that may occur in our printing colours and solve them before unacceptable deviations are printed.’
