Waldkirch, Germany based August Faller GmbH & Co. KG has placed an advance order for the Primefire 106 digital printing system from Heidelberg, becoming one of the first customers in the world. The company makes folding cartons, package inserts, and adhesive labels as well as combination products and packaging services.
The decision to invest in the machine was driven by the fact that pharmaceutical and healthcare market is increasingly moving towards specialized medicinal products. As a result, the packaging runs for these specially developed medicines are becoming ever shorter, along with the delivery times.
“We specialize in the production of secondary packaging for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, and see ourselves as a supply chain partner to our customers,” explains managing partner Dr. Michael Faller. “The diversity of the Primefire technology will create new opportunities in packaging production, which is increasingly moving towards customization, serialization, and digitization.”
“As a specialist in offset printing, high print image quality is also crucial for us. Our print tests on the Primefire showed coverage of 95% of the Pantone color space. Furthermore the result achieved with the substrates we used was identical to that of offset printing. End customers will not be able to notice any difference compared with conventional offset printing results at first glance,” says Peter Ganter, director of the PharmaServiceCenter Folding Cartons in Waldkirch.
August Faller currently uses ten Heidelberg sheetfed presses in 50 x 70 cm format at its sites in Waldkirch and Lodz in Poland. It also has two die-cutting machines and nine folder gluers from Heidelberg for its postpress needs.
The August Faller Group is constantly working on its digitization strategy. “Digital printing is an important link in the digitization of our administrative and productive processes. By networking digital printing with our preprint processes and the digital ordering and job system, we will increase the profitability and flexibility of our processes in the long term and, by doing so, also generate benefits for customers,” explains Jörg Frischkorn, head of European operations for Faller.
The Primefire 106 was presented at drupa 2016 and is the first industrial digital printing system in B1 format. The first field test was recently started, and a further one is due to start at the end of the year. Heidelberg is on schedule with the market launch, with demand from customers already outstripping production capacity.
