KBA Rapida 75E Pumps Out Pharmaceutical Packaging
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The first Rapida 75E in Austria came on stream in late January at Vienna-based Eberle-Druck, a subsidiary of the Rattpack group and a specialist printer of pharmaceutical packaging and securities. Back in 1992 Eberle was the first printer in Austria to achieve continuous ISO 9001 accreditation up to the present day. It was also the first to adopt ctp. Many of Eberle's presses are one-off, customised models.
Eberle-Druck was established at the end of the 19th century, and following its acquisition by the Rattpack group continued to be managed by the founding family, now in the fifth generation. For managing director Martin Schmutterer, the big advantages of being part of Rattpack are the synergies that can be exploited, from joint purchasing and central accounting to standardised consumables. The individual production plants are all highly specialised. While Eberle's product range has comprised 90 per cent drug packaging and 10 per cent securities (share certificates, coupons, public transport tickets etc) since the 1970s, a plant in Dornbirn prints food packaging and folding cartons for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and was the first in Austria to achieve accreditation under the rigorous ISO 22000 food standard. In Apolda, Germany, the production line has been plugged directly into the customer's manufacturing line, which mostly makes pizza packaging. This concept has proved so successful that it is now being expanded. Another German operation, Multipack in Mindelheim, primarily prints laminated packaging, eg for the textile industry. The group's Bulgarian plant in Plovdiv specialises in DVD inserts and cigarette packs. At the end of December last year the group acquired a developer of digital workflow systems for brand manufacturers. Its most recent acquisition is a printer of standard commercial products.
Many materials, many inks and many languages
The Rapida 75E is the Rattpack group's first new-generation KBA press, though Multipack operates older models and Planeta presses. The B2 (29in) six-colour coater press is ideal for printing pharmaceutical packaging. Print runs are often as short as 500 sheets, and would be unviable on a bigger press. "We virtually sell makeready time, since it comprises as much as 80 per cent of any print job," explains Martin Schmutterer. The Rapida 75E's automatic format adjustment, automatic washing, semi-automatic plate changing and touchscreen display with quick-select buttons has cut this time dramatically.
The press can handle the firm's entire range of substrates, from 40gsm (10lb bond) paper for dosage instructions to 600 and 700gsm (24-27pt) board for packaging. Almost all the colours are spot, and most of the packaging is for prescription drugs, which are printed in two or three colours. The rest is for generic drugs and has a higher colour content. Such packaging sometimes costs as much as the entire contents, but offers higher growth potential than packaging for proprietary drugs. Over the counter (OTC) products are also more colourful (Euroscale and up to two special colours) and have a more sophisticated finish (aqueous coating is standard, but spot coating is also used). Flexo presses are used for UV coatings.
Dosage instructions, particularly for OTC products and food supplements, are printed in anything up to four-backing-four. Folded, they can be as much as 1cm (0.4in) thick, since the instructions are often translated into 25 languages. The packaging, however, is printed in just one language, so multiple versions are required for medication that is distributed internationally. Since there are also different product sizes, between 40 and 50 different types of pack must be produced for any one medication. Chinese and Arabic have almost become routine, Icelandic and Finnish are less common. To ensure that there are no errors in the texts the proofs are compared with the original PDFs using a PDF scanner from EyeC.
Competence in pharmaceutical packaging
The high level of staff competence at Eberle-Druck is evident in the care and precision with which drug packaging is produced. Because of the many different languages used it is not possible to use a single font or logo, but all the data are vectorised. A highly automated workflow also helps to ensure absolute accuracy. "Even though we have had to print more and more languages, over the past forty years or more we have not had a single typo," says Martin Schmutterer proudly.
Eberle-Druck has developed its own coding system for folding cartons, which excludes the insertion of other products. Every step in the production chain is logged electronically, thus providing an audit trail. There is a terminal at every workstation for capturing production data in real time. The four-eyes principle is applied whenever a major decision must be made, and five of the 85 staff are engaged in quality control. Packaging is produced in three shifts. The colour densities for the Rapida 75E are checked and logged via KBA DensiTronic, which ensures precise colour reproduction in repeat runs. Since packaging designs are constantly being changed there is no point in pre-printing or in holding sizeable stocks of finished goods.
Textbook production start
The Rapida 75E receives its presetting data via CIP3 from an ESKO Artwork pre-press system specifically engineered for packaging. Martin Schmutterer is still visibly impressed by the military precision with which the old press was dismantled and the Rapida 75E installed and commissioned - especially since it was all completed in such a brief period of time and without disrupting production. "Seldom has the installation of a new press gone so smoothly," he says. The Rapida 75E has fulfilled all his expectations and compellingly demonstrates its capabilities in day-to-day print production. The training and initial production support provided by KBA and its Austrian subsidiary KBA-Mödling, coupled with practical automation and control systems, quickly enabled the operating crew to master the new press.
Eberle-Druck has been at its present location on the outskirts of Vienna since 1992. The premises offer 3,500m² (38,000ft²) of production floor space plus plenty of room for expansion, and Rattpack is already planning further investments in Eberle's pharmaceutical packaging capability. There are also a lot of other businesses in the vicinity, which makes joint projects and collaboration much easier.
Martin Dänhardt
+49 351 833-2580
martin.daenhardt@kba.com
