On his regular year-end visit to Australian recently Rony Shmulevitch, sales and marketing director, Asia region for Israel-headquartered world leader in automated inspection technology, AVT, foreshadowed the need for more automation in the local packaging and labelling market.
He stressed that the regularity of his visits over the past four years has contributed to AVT’s progress since the appointment of DES as its distribution agents. “We can see the fruits of this close relationship in terms of the progress we have been able to make in the marketplace,” he stated.
Shmulevitch attributes much of the Group’s success in the local packaging market to the fact that the Industry here embraced European standards, which he noted is not the case in Asia. A further factor has been AVT’s progress in the labelling market. Shmulevitch noted, “From hardly being represented in it, labelling has become a major part of our Australian business and yet there is still the need for a lot of education.”
Emphasising the packaging industry’s trend toward ever greater automation, he pointed to the need for further automating processes, not only of the equipment being used but for making the entire process more user friendly for both operator and the entire workflow. “These are needs we have been pursuing for quite some time - how to use the equipment better, how to shorten set-up time,” he pointed out.
“In the process are coming more into the picture in striving to provide assistance to packaging printers and labelling converters with improvement of the entire management process... with what you do with your people. This could be related to the operators, to equipment maintenance, to the stock being printed on. In this way we can help printers cut their costs and be more efficient in the face of ever declining margins.”
One of the areas which the AVT executive nominated as needing greater workflow efficiency is in the finishing processes of carton production runs. With constant calls for higher quality output, how to inspect the finished product more efficiently is being closely examined but, noted Shmulevitch, “We’re not there yet.”
Meanwhile Russell Robertson, director of sales for labels and packaging at DES, revealed that the first of two installations are expected to be completed in the next two months of the new Workflow Link for the narrow web market which picks up defects on press and allows offline editing of the recorded file. This then allows the rewinders and finishing units to run at full speed without the need for a second camera.
Asked how he rates DES in terms of capabilities to service its market compared to other AVT distributors around the world, Shmulevitch unhesitatingly responded as being “at the highest level”.