Digital Printing Options

Dekeukelaere: Better offerings to their customers: Flexibility, shorter lead times, shorter runs, versioning, seasonal-ization, postponement...just to name a few.

Stack: Digital printing brings many advantages to the packaging printer.

As run lengths continue to reduce and SKU versions increase, packaging printers today are forced to deal with more and more setups, more plates, increased waste and increased labor. Because digital printing eliminates the need for setups, these cost savings come back to the packaging printer. For most narrow-web label printers for example, setup costs for a job can be between $100-$250 at a minimum. This includes the cost of labor for setup (for multi color jobs this can be between 45 minutes and 2 hours), substrate waste (100-300 ft), new or replacement plates (depending on if it is a reorder or not). Those three components (labor, substrate waste and plates, if required) determine whether or not a packaging printer is going to run a given job digitally. Most of our customers tell us if they can find just 4-5 jobs per day to move to digital, the average cost savings per job are over $100. This means by just running 4-5 jobs per day on digital, the press pays for itself. Most packaging printers have more then enough jobs in hand today to justify a press.