David Reid is Global Sales Manager at Sun Chemical with a particular focus on inkjet inks for labels. Managing the global Inkjet sales AOP through our sales teams in Europe, China and the USA. In this article, we ask him about the label sector, the level of inkjet adoption, the trends and opportunities.

How did you get started in the print industry?

I joined a traditional reprographic company in 1986, involving everything from drum colour scanning, camera operator, step & repeat, litho platemaking, litho colour proofing for test printing and print profiling. Very traditional equipment and skills in our industry which have almost all been digitised, but the experience can still be invaluable. In 2000, I joined Akzo Nobel narrow web inks as an in-plant technician, quickly progressing into a technical sales role.

 Joining Sun Chemical in 2003 afforded me the opportunity to expand the technology aspects of my role with Litho, Screen, Flexo, Security, the markets in my role to packaging, brand protection, graphics, POS as well as developing into progressive management roles and in 2017, I also completed my MBA.

What did the MBA provide you with?

It gave me a good understanding of the wider business outside of Sun Chemical, ink and the print industry. I have always had a sales and technical focus, but the MBA gave me a proficiency and understanding of wider business functions such as manufacturing, finance, people management and corporate compliance, and that all helped me immensely to support the overall goals in our business. Sun Chemical business is seeded throughout with the knowledge and systems that large corporations need to work with, and the MBA helped me to understand why we do business the way we do.

On a personal level, what does the MBA give you?

It gives you the ability to sit in a boardroom and understand every function each person performs, and you develop an understanding or empathy around it. It gives you the clarity and understanding of what is important to them and as a result, you can find a common ground to work together by understand the subtleties of their function or wider business needs.

Has having the MBA helped you selling digital inks?

It has for the label market, but I think it will before even more useful for the packaging sector. Selling Inkjet inks across the globe for the packaging sector will be ever more complex for the largest OEM machines as the ink supply model has the potential to bridge the gap to a more direct supply. These larger machines carry a high capital cost and the purchaser wants to be assured that the ink will perform as it should, will be fully compatible with the printhead, will have longevity in supply and ultimately fulfils the regulatory needs for the market the ink is used in. This is where Sun Chemical is second to none with a 20+ year history of inkjet inks blended with a 200+ year history of analogue inks. However, the organisations that purchase these machines will often have layers of corporate bureaucracy to work around and an understanding of this is exceptionally helpful.

Is the digital label sector growing?

Yes, it is. If you consider the recent Smithers PIRA report, digital press sales are now outstripping analogue press sales. This doesn’t yet, reflect in the total print output volume, but we will see more and more digital machines being installed when an analogue machine ends its life in order to meet changing market conditions. The pace of change will continue, and I believe it will become 65% of machine sales in 3 years as digital machines become faster and more financially viable.  

What is driving growth in demand for Inkjet for labels?

The reason for the growth is that inkjet printing enables the reducing print run size, reducing inventory risk, regionalisation of product labelling due to compliance, the proliferation of SKUs caused by changing demographics and our desire for more single portion goods. Inkjet label printing has the ability to take away many of those smaller run costs. I contacted several carton printers and label makers when I was running a research project as part of my MBA and every one of them highlighted that a key change in the last 3 years was the reduction of run lengths (reducing by -22% to -55%). The actual volume (M2) of print per year was not in decline, but the number of SKUs had increased tremendously through an ever-increasing need for later-stage decisions and smaller production runs for a greater variety of products. I wouldn’t say this is the only factor driving digital, but label makers are getting fed up producing shorter runs with analogue machines due to both the lack of cost competitiveness and the disruption to its traditional production model. It’s quite common for a convertor to have both analogue and digital print options available. This can frequently help the analogue press work more efficiently by concentrating this resource on long runs, while the digital press is utilised for the shorter runs and versioning. I believe that individualisation, and mass versioning will happen more and more, but packaging marketeers are seemingly not up to speed with what the digital presses are capable of and ultimately, these presses may not be housed in the correct locations to be fully utilised.

In the label sector, are OEMs your main partners?

Yes. Our strength is to partner with digital OEMs and utilise both our inkjet expertise, as well as our analogue ink history and market knowledge to create leading inkjet inks. This approach also applies to our analogue OEMs who are transitioning into digital. We work as closely as possible with our partners early on, and throughout the process, developing the right ink to get a stable and viable product.

How is the digital label ink market-driven?

It is OEM driven, and there are two types of OEM. The type that knows how to build a digital engine but may not have the same pedigree in the label market, and the traditional analogue OEM, who in turn may not have the pedigree in digital, but understands the subtleties, technical issues, culture and the customers within the label market. In my opinion, you may see the best innovation achieved when you put them together as traditional manufacturers mixed with digital. For example, with the Durst/ Koenig & Bauer packaging partnership, you get the best of both worlds. This is a great opportunity and I’m sure we will see more JV’s and projects like this going forward.  That said, there are companies that have entered the market with digital machines and done it well. For example, HP has developed a strong market share with Indigo, with new inkjet machines coming to market from Durst, Mark Andy, Domino and others with rapidly increasing market shares and showing what can be done with the latest single-pass inkjet technology. However, I think that in traditional packaging (including labels) the most successful model technically and commercially will evolve to be the partnership model.

HOW IMPORTANT IS INK TO THE SUCCESS OF A NEW INKJET MACHINE?

Ink is always key. However, surprisingly, ink can often be an afterthought. This can result in additional time, effort and cost later in the machine build if you do not get the ink specified and considered from the start. In analogue Flexo printing, you need to balance the anilox volume, the ink density and dot gain with the repro, through a fingerprinting process to achieve consistency, and this is a toolkit which can be adjusted to suit any machine platform. In inkjet, you need to combine multiple printheads with drive electronics and a suitable waveform tuned with the ink, then integrate that with a specific process of curing/drying the ink. This is a blend of hardware and consumables that is best designed to work together right from the start and perfected at each stage of the machine development in order to have a complete system which is built to the required specification. I have seen instances of OEMs designing a machine platform without considering if the ink can achieve their demands with the machine architecture and ultimately having to redesign the press at a later stage to fit with the available ink technology.

Will Inkjet become a technology that is added to the analogue process as opposed to a standalone system?

It’s actually both, but it will depend on the user of the label press. At Labelexpo, there were several examples of our inkjet ink partner OEMs using more productive 4 colour or ECG process print digital modules, integrated with analogue technology which provided options for primers, whites, varnishes and cold foil etc. On another scale, we saw many smaller machines, primarily aimed at the downstream user of labels and whom perhaps have less of a requirement for the enhancements that a hybrid press platform offers, but has more of a need for JIT printing with low stock holding, small footprint and low initial capital investment. These Memjet and HP thermal printhead based machines do offer a much lower initial fixed cost base for the hardware, but higher variable cost for the ongoing consumables. For packaging, I believe it will be a digital print module that will end up on the packaging line closer to the end of production, i.e. where goods are packaged, but this is a long way off yet.

What is the key challenge with Inkjet in labels?

I think it is more to do with marketing and supply chains. Do the marketing people understand what digital can really do? The marketing community are still stuck in an analogue label-printing world. The current push is for shorter runs and proliferation of SKUs in the analogue world, but the digital world will grow when the marketeers become proficient with what is truly possible with Inkjet, like regionalisation and personalisation. Added to this will be financial pressures in the supply chain - people just don’t want money tied up in working capital. The potential to move towards lean manufacturing is a very powerful argument for inkjet, as it will enable converters, printers and even the brand owners at the point of packaging, to not have to hold multiple SKUs and simply print on demand. All the advantages of digital as a marketing enabler belong as close to the point of packaging as possible in order to benefit from speedy design changes whilst not having to run down the existing stock. Of course, we also need to consider the overall cost per label for inkjet to penetrate traditional markets. Simply replacing analogue with inkjet will not likely be an economically viable straight calculation for longer print runs, but if you can print just in time, you can add the savings of elimination of waste and obsolescence as well as reduced working capital, hence my comment about placing inkjet printers downstream towards the point of packaging. However, for this to happen I think it will require a generational change.

Why is the analogue culture you mention such a problem?

I think the culture and infrastructure are there to utilise every unit of capacity in a volume-driven market, which I believe already has overcapacity. It will take a huge shift to move this to digital while the overcapacity sits with analogue assets already accrued for. Also, people want brand identity and consistency and a different process may also look and feel different, although our latest inkjet inks are challenging that!

AT LABELEXPO WHAT DID YOU SHOW?

We had examples on display to show what can be done with our EtiJet inkjet inks for labels that are nearly identical in output quality with analogue (UV Flexo). We used the same digital file to produce a 7x spot colour design printed UV Flexo and colour matched to a very tight ΔE tolerance utilising our SunColorBox toolbox which manages brand colour specification and output control. We then also simply pressed ‘go’ for 1,000 labels from the same file on a production inkjet press which utilises our Etijet expanded gamut process ink set, with no intervention on the colour profiling. We challenged many from across the label industry to identify which was the inkjet print and which was UV Flexo print, and it was very funny to see their beads of sweat as these learned minds realised it was not so easy to tell apart! This has set the tone in getting very impressive results which will expand into the wider packaging market in years to come. For labels, we are already hearing of brand owners asking if their jobs can be completed with a digital press as they like the consistency and the benefits of short runs for individualisation or regionalisation. In another example, we showed our Amplio effects range including very high build inkjet varnishing on folding carton board and clear film, giving a tactile finish to challenge high build screen print, but of course with the benefits of no setup time, no setup costs and the benefit of variable imaging. Utilising the same product, we also showed its capability to be used as a digital cold foil adhesive. This has generated a great amount of interest from many of our OEMs.

To comment or connect with David email here.