Growth often means new locations and capacity expansion for carton manufacturers. In Canpac’s ongoing modernization process, this also means structural investment in new packaging and technologies such as gravure and flexo printing. Reported by Naresh Khanna.
From its beautiful factory in Bawla, an hour’s drive from Ahmedabad towards Rajkot, Canpac continues its brief existence as a packaging manufacturer and processor by adding new packaging locations, technologies and verticals. 7 years to maintain rapid growth. The current wave of modernization and expansion began about a year ago with the expansion of the plant in Tirupur, South India, with the addition of a 7-color KBA Rapida 106 UV offset coater, and continues to this day and has a larger scale with more diverse designs at the head plant near Ahmedabad.
With the addition of a 7-color KBA Rapida 106 UV coater, the factory south has been transformed from a corrugated box supplier to a full board supplier. Although this freed up capacity at the parent plant, its three Heidelberg multicolor presses were already 90% used, making an expansion necessary. This January, just seven months after installing the new KBA Rapida, the company signed another KBA Rapida with a very similar configuration, this time with a higher degree of automation, including online QCC color matching and defect detection systems. The new press is likely to be shipped and operational within the first 120 days of the 2018-19 fiscal year and will contribute significantly to the company’s annual revenue growth and reach its ambitious but realistic target of Rs. 4 billion in the next 3 years.
Canpac’s target turnover is just over double the current turnover, but without undue pressure, it’s reasonable or doable because it’s based on a big expansion plan in Ahmedabad, which is not only a one-box package, but will make the company one of the country’s largest supplier of composite packaging materials. Canpac’s own fleet of 20 trucks will manufacture and deliver flexible packaging and pouches, single sheet cartons, litho-laminated micro-fluted cartons, flexo-printed shipping cartons and paper shopping bags.
The company exceeds Rs. The $1.5 billion expansion and upgrade is largely complete, although several sections of the plant need to be completed quickly to get machines waiting to be installed and arriving monthly. The final phase of the ongoing construction will provide 600,000 square feet of floor space for the complex, including dedicated space for future expansion, as well as a 7,000-square-foot creative module called the Bank of Innovation, Research and Development (BIRD) for packaging development. ideas, concepts and innovations and prototype.
The master plan has four main streams, each with its own new main and auxiliary equipment and production jobs. New corrugated board assets include a new 5-layer corrugator, corrugator, 6-color flexographic sifter and Sakurai automatic screen printing press, in addition to three earlier folder gluers.
A vertical plant or flexible packaging plant is equipped with a Bobst Rotomec 5002 8-color machine with movable guide bars for finishing in any combination, and an integrated E+L control system that was installed only three months ago. Accessories already installed on the booth include a Nordmeccanica solventless laminator, a Kalpavrux slitter and inspection machine, and several bagging combinations.
Canpac’s factory, which produces both luxury and regular paper bags, seems to be one of the most innovative and exciting parts of the current refurbishment project. Machines in the new paper bag plant include a 7-color web flexo printing machine and a European large bag processing machine. Particularly intriguing was Nilesh Tody’s idea of ​​producing 5 million paper bags per month with paper handles that could compete on price with plastic bags, in addition to the luxury and greener benefits of paper.
The fourth line is likely to be the heart of the upgrade as it brings Canpac’s proven expertise in single sheet and lithographed cartons by adding a fourth multicolor offset packaging machine, the aforementioned KBA Rapida 106 7. Production capacity has been increased. to a new level – combined UV printing with ink and coater, well configured with four intermediate layers, UV curing system at the end of printing and camera-based automatic registration system.
The press, which will be installed in July, will also be one of the first in the country to be equipped with KBA’s QCC system, which provides full-format inspection of each printed sheet during production, as well as a convenient anilox roll loading system. the system can store and use any of the three anilox rolls designed for a specific type of coating. New additions to the carton converting department include a Bobst Novacut installed in July 2017 as well as a large number of existing die cutters and folder gluers.
We asked Nilesh Tody, CEO of Canpac, what prompted him to buy his first KBA Rapida 106, he may have been witty when he said it was the maximum sheet size for a press. “At size 106, the Rapida 106 7-color UV coater is very competitive,” he said.
As for the re-order to install a second Rapida 7-color plus coater at the Ahmedabad plant within six months, Todi was even more insistent. He found that the Rapida 106 at Canpac’s southern plant was 30% more efficient than his earlier machines. “Even though this is a new machine, the average productivity in terms of makeready and number of sheets after downtime is significantly higher.”
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