If digital printing is one half of the equation, digital finishing is the other half. And for digital finishing in the packaging moment the only real name in town in Highcon. Others can offer laser cutting, but as a standalone process. And even then they are not shipping in numbers according to Highcon vice president Simon Lewis. Highcon is currently the only supplier with creasing as well as cutting.
This gives Highcon a unique perspective over the development on digital print in corrugated on both sides of the Atlantic. And it’s over there that is ahead, he explains. “Web to box has gone through the roof in North America” he says. “It’s allowing smaller businesses to specify boxes to ship their products direct to consumers without going through an Amazon shipping box.
“It means too that there are a lot of new customers buying corrugated boxes, perhaps in the hundreds or low thousands of units at a time. And that favours digital printing. These printers are companies that can work to shorter lead times, unlike the larger businesses that have long lead times. They are agile and dynamic and growing fast.”
One Highcon customer BoxMaker has taken delivery of its third Highcon inside a year. Other web to box companies include Box Genie and Packlane. These are independent companies that have led the way on digital print investment.
By contrast in Europe, there is investment in digital printing, but with larger businesses that have a finishing set up and are not buying Highcon. “That’s a bit of a mystery,” Lewis says. “Web to pack is much slower in Europe which is a surprise considering the uptake of web to print. In Europe web to box is still in the gestation period, but I believe the opportunity is there.”
Two aspects are perhaps lacking in Europe. The infrastructure within businesses is not present. The need is for automation from the portal through the plant to dispatch and that is lacking. Secondly many box making businesses do not have marketing skills unlike, says Lewis, the US businesses, where marketing people work alongside the operations people.
“The likes of Smurfit Kappa and DS Smith will have these marketing skills, but not the culture for web to box. Web to box is not just a different channel, it’s a completely different way of thinking and working. The big US companies are not interested in small order volumes. In the US Amcor as a large flexible packaging producer could not do what ePac as a dynamic start up has done.” Ironically Amcor is now a major investor in ePac, recognition of this very point.
He says: “Digital does not solve anything for the large companies: it is slower and has a high variable cost. To succeed they are starting to understand that a digital venture has to be a separate business.”
And the major converters are also very strong and very efficient at producing a limited choice, what Lewis talks of as the Henry Ford model. Vistaprint, he says, works like this, Pixart is much more able to produce smaller quantities of differentiated box products. “This is the real meaning of web to box – not the Henry Ford model. If this can work in North America it can’t be that there’s a lack of need in Europe.”
It might be that Europe’s box buyers are led by the box providers that have little interest in encouraging buyers to try something different; it could be that buyers have a psychological issue with taking a risk and working in a different way.
That is going to change, says Lewis. Highcon is starting to supply new customers and new machines into the European market thanks to a more focused approach to its sales and marketing efforts, away from the intricate value added approach and towards achieving real production needs. And the influx of digital presses for corrugated suggests that the real production needs exist.
Specifiers want to order on demand, they want flexibility. Converters, or new entrants to the sector will succeed if they can use technology to respond to be able to deliver shorter run jobs in a faster time, moving from analogue processes and thinking digitally.
“It is,” says Lewis, “like moving from using a rotary dial on a handset to phone someone to moving to a smart phone. It’s not just that production process, it’s the whole end to end system that supports it. To succeed, the industry needs to examine the whole process.”
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