Flexo Quick to Learn Advantages of CTP

When it comes to packaging, commercial printers could take a page from flexo's book.

EXTRA! COMPUTER-TO-PLATE goes mainstream! Granted, it's not much of a headliner these days. The basic principles of computer-to-plate (CTP) are well-established in both the offset and the flexographic worlds, both technologies having come to market about a decade ago. Since then, however, their adoption curves have differed sharply.

Offset CTP took off primarily in the commercial side of the business, where concerns about its viability and the expense associated with its adoption were quickly overcome. The same has not been the case in the flexographic market—until recently.

According to Mark Vanover, director of marketing for Esko-Graphics, newer trends and technologies are increasing the importance and influence of digital flexo applications, notably, the consistency and repeatability it brings to flexographic platemaking. At the same time, package printing is being widely touted as an up-and-coming profit center for commercial printers whose bread-and-butter is typically 4-color process printing. Certainly, most major manufacturers are marketing plates and platesetting equipment suitable for both the commercial and flexographic markets.

This month, packagePRINTING spoke with Vanover to get a handle on digital flexo and the growing trend among commercial printers to enter into the package-printing market.

pP: Is computer-to-plate a mainstream technology in the flexographic world?

Vanover: From an overall perspective, CTP is certainly mainstream in the offset world. It's not new technology. In flexography, CTP has been around just as long, but probably has no more than 15 percent market penetration.

pP: What are the reasons for this?

Vanover: There are a multitude of reasons. There is some short-run folding carton that's flexo, but it's a very small part of the market. Corrugators don't really need the capabilities of digital plates. However, that is changing, due to the requirements of retailers like Wal-Mart, Costco, and Target. From a graphics perspective, big-box retailing requires that the shipment packaging also serve as the primary packaging. While there's a lot of preprint, there's also a lot of direct printing, and that's where digital can help.

pP: Can you comment on the role that the trade shops will have as CTP gains traction in the flexo marketplace?

Vanover: I think that the trade shops have still been very strong from the perspective of keeping their value in the supply chain. Folding carton converters, and flexible packaging converters, corrugators, even tag and label companies, continue to buy flexo plates. But that is changing. From an economic perspective, the cost of the hardware solutions has come down and the cost of the consumables has come down a little, but flexographic plates are still significantly more expensive than offset plates.

pP: Is this bad news for the trade shops?

Vanover: Actually, it's opportunity for the trade shops. If the trade shops are forward thinking and visionary in the way they do their business, they will become facility managers. A lot of the bigger trade shops actually have gone that way and have considerable facilities management expertise.

pP: What factors account for the shift you're describing?

Vanover: A lot of it is time to market. Packaging has become an advertising medium. So converters who never thought that they would ever have to think about making plates internally now have to do it. And that's where trade shops have an opportunity to say, "We will partner with you, Mr. Converter, and we will place an entire facility in your business, so that the expertise comes from the trade shop." The converter reaps the benefits but doesn't have to make the investment in personnel.

pP: Does the fact that CTP is entrenched in the offset world make it easier for commercial printers to move into packaging?

Vanover: Publications in the commercial print side of the business keep touting that the holy grail of profitability for commercial offset printers is to print packaging. That's an easy thing to say from a broad perspective, but when you look deeper, it's just not true.

pP: It's said to be a trend.

Vanover: The reason it's a fallacy is primarily that consumer goods companies are being squeezed by the retailers. They're coming to their partners, whether they are converters or trade shops and saying, "Look, you have to reduce your costs." And yet in the commercial print markets, which are primarily commodity businesses, printers think there's profitability in printing folding cartons or pressure-sensitive labels on an offset press because that's all they can go after. They have to understand that the folding carton market is being squeezed by offshore competition because manufacturing is offshore. Plus, other types of technologies—stand-up pouches and things like that—are encroaching on the folding carton market. So the commercial printer thinks there's a huge opportunity—but there isn't.

pP: What is the misunderstanding, in your opinion?

Vanover: Commercial printers don't understand what goes into package design. It's not just graphics, it's understanding the structure and what's going to happen to that structure: How it's going to be folded, what's it going do. You've got bar codes, you've got trapping that's different, it might be 12 colors—they just don't understand the highly complex nature of packaging.

pP: Most commercial printers aren't doing more than a fraction of their business in packaging.

Vanover: And the reason is that they don't have the resources—the time, personnel, range of equipment, and expertise the converter has.

pP: Doesn't the fact that they have all the prepress in-house give them an advantage?

Vanover: That's another thing. They think they're set up for it and they have the know-how in-house, but while they have the equipment and can do the prepress, they don't understand the business.

pP: Does it cost more to do 5,000 folding cartons flexo or offset?

Vanover: Based on my experience, and given a mid-web press that can run just about any type of substrate, you can do it completely in-line. You can rotary diecut it at the end of the press, stack it and it's finished. So it's a serial operation. With offset, it's not a serial. It's printed here, you take it off the back, then you have to move it somewhere and diecut it. And the fact is that most of these commercial printers are not set up to do diecutting to the intricacy of a folding carton. Flexo can do it more cost-effectively for short runs.

pP: Is there a quality issue?

Vanover: I don't think so. An offset printer would probably say the quality is better, but I certainly disagree, especially when you start looking at digital flexo and platemaking, some of the things you can do with flexo plates, some of the new press technologies. For example, you probably could print 400 linescreen on an offset press. You're not going to do that in flexo. Then again, you probably don't need to print 400 linescreen on an offset press to get good quality. I don't think there's a quality difference. I do think there's a significant difference in the versatility of flexography with respect to the variety of things they can print on.

pP: Is it possible to do both commercial printing and package printing well within a single plant?

Vanover: Sure. A commercial printer most likely will have CTP and some kind of workflow to get the data from the customer to the platesetter, but that workflow may not necessarily give them all the means they need to print folding cartons. If they do their homework, and understand that just because you can get the data from the customer to the offset plate doesn't mean you can get packaging data and design from the customer to the offset plate. It's not just that you're working in three dimensions, although a box will be folded and become something different from a page and a piece of collateral, but it's all those things that happen to packaging from a trapping perspective: regulatory compliance, bar codes, things like that. Color management is also more complex for a 12-color box than it is for a 4-color piece of collateral. This is why they would need a separate workflow to support that kind of work if they believe they can add value and bring in that work and provide the level of quality their customers are going to expect. It has nothing to do with the output device; it has everything to do with the workflow that supports it.

pP: What do you say to the commercial offset printer who is contemplating a move into the packaging market?

Vanover: Commercial printers that are thinking of pursuing packaging need to dig down into the decision because there's a lot more to it than finding someone to print boxes for. If a commercial printer calls us and says, "We want to get into packaging, we've done our homework, and we have the workflow to support it," we'll talk to them and help them through the process because we have the packaging workflow.

pP: Yet the adoption rate of CTP in the flexo world has been slow.

Vanover: There's been slow, steady growth, but we've seen a significant upturn in the last two years.

pP: To what do you attribute this?

Vanover: I would attribute it to the requirements for better quality than analog flexography is able to provide, compressed time frames, time-to-market—all the things that drive improvements through a manufacturing process are also driving digital flexo.

pP: What trends are you seeing in CTP for flexo?

Vanover: In terms of hardware, to make it quicker, obviously, easier to use, with automatic plate-loading and unloading. There also are ways to create efficiencies from an imaging perspective. We're seeing more adoption in the tag and label market, but the reason trade shop people are getting busier in the corrugated and folding carton markets, is probably that they're supplying more plates and doing facilities management. Because the other thing that happened is that while packaging has become an advertising medium, packaging runs, like print runs, are getting shorter. They become cross-promotional tie-ins with a movie like Shrek or a NASCAR race or the World Series. There's also regionalization and culturalization. You still may print a couple of million Coke cartons a week, but those couple of million all may be different because they're going to different regions of the country. Hence, the requirements for more plates.

pP: What does Esko-Graphics bring to the party?

Vanover: Where Esko-Graphics strives to change technology is software. ArtiosCAD, our CAD-CAM software for folding carton and corrugated, controls roughly 80 percent to 85 percent of the American market. For us, it's all about making sure graphics and structure talk to one another very early in the process so that errors can be caught electronically, as opposed to getting through to the manufacturing process. We understand both workflows—the structure and the graphics.

pP: What is the outlook for digital flexo?

Vanover: Folding carton, corrugated, point-of-purchase, flexible packaging, tag and label—all have huge growth potential, and our sales reflect this.

Jean-Marie Hershey is an author and editor specializing in the graphic communications industry.

She can be reached at jmh@writehandcom.com