Managing director, Guy Colebourne (left), and Nick Mickley, operations manager, at the installation of the new Xeikon 3500 press

A family-owned business established 40 years ago, Colebourne & Partners Ltd produces lids for trays and short run cartons. Previously buying in litho printed sheets, it invested in a Xeikon 3500 press in 2013 to bring the printing in house. Managing director, Guy Colebourne, invited Sean Smyth to view the operation, and explained the strategy behind the almost £1 million investment.

Turning over £1.5 million, C&P Packaging is located in Melksham, in Wiltshire, and customers include food wholesalers, bakeries and ethnic takeaway foods. Up until 2013, the company oursourced all printing, while handling the design and finishing in house, applying the necessary coatings and laminates with cutting and creasing. Last year, the company invested in a Xeikon 3500 press with bespoke finishing line for printing cartons and lids.

 

Change needed

The printed sheets that were bought in needed a lot of storage with C&P operating four units covering 17,000 square feet and housing stock value often exceeding £200,000. Some 10-15% of these were redundant, through changing demand mix, or ingredient changes rendering the print obsolete. Outsourcing print meant that the company was unable to satisfy some rapid turnaround requests, and it was impracticable to print and track all up to 300 variants in some cases, without high wastage levels and cost. Long lead times and high minimum order quantities also constrained the marketing efforts of customers, and it was difficult to handle artwork changes, and respond to tight version control necessary to meet the changing food labelling legislation.

So C&P brainstormed improvements with customers, to make efficiencies and improve service and quality. The solution was to buy a digital press with finishing and develop a sophisticated front-end database artwork system that would allow changes to be made simply while also opening up online ordering possibilities. The choice was a Xeikon 3500 five colour press with a new finishing system from GM with front flexo coating/printing and lamination, a turner bar with rear UV adhesive polyester cold lamination, two fully rotary die-cutting stations, waste rewind and automatic stacking and shrink wrapping.

The constant print speed with no requirement for priming worked in Xeikon’s favour, together with the food safety certifications available for the toners. There were few issues during the implementation period, only some minor issues with the finishing that were solved fairly quickly. The business changed to a print on demand model, away from stock management. Artwork is now managed with automatic version control available so ingredient changes can be applied immediately providing much greater flexibility. The front end has been developed in house, with a controlled database publishing application that manages the content. This provides easy updating of template artwork changes across ranges quickly and efficiently.

 

Room to grow 

C&P is pushing the capabilities of the press with board up to 630 micron calliper and has switched to the Alpine fuser drum system, where a softer surface improves the life on heavy stocks. Toner is supplied on a click-charge basis rather than by weight. The products are shrink-wrapped in 250s, now the minimum order quantity and the company can react with same day delivery available at a price.

Moving from sheetfed to webfed production has provided production efficiencies in laminating ‒ Mr Colebourne describes it as ‘more relaxing’ ‒ and this has radically improved the service level. There was little ramping up volumes as C&P ceased buying in printed sheets, operating the press up to 11 hours a day when it was delivered. This immediately eliminated the stock and associated wastage, saving the warehousing by reducing space needed from 17,000 to 4,500 square feet.

There have been few downsides to the changes and C&P is looking to grow. There is space for a second press and the company has several developments that include high value personalised snackfood cartons posted to potential buyers as part of the customer acquisition process.

A new online ordering portal for small businesses to design and buy high quality packaging packaging, web-to-carton, is planned for the summer. C&P wants to provide premium packaging for small artisan producers, at similar unit cost to higher volumes. There are many possibilities from a local takeaway provider to national brands. The company has improved its previous supply chain by using digital carton production to provide better service to customers, opening up many new opportunities.