As we wrote in the first of this series, getting into monocartons for most commercial printers entails a serious commitment to building a sustainable professional organization.
Professionalization is the antithesis of an owner-run and -managed company. Many founder owners and promoters are thoroughly qualified professionals and even those that are not can generate professionals. However, for traditional owner managers, the idea of sharing decision making authority and responsibility with employees is a huge psychological challenge.
The human resource
In a hierarchical society, the very idea of investing in a young professional is daunting. The print diploma and engineering degree courses are taught by institutions without any real modern technology on their premises. The only exposure of potential
employees comes from their limited internships and their first years of work experience. The best are lured to sales by equipment and consumable manufacturers and distributors.
Others are hired by large newspaper publishers or the print and packaging departments of consumer product companies. Commercial offset printers and even the offset packaging converters are often seen as the least professional and worst paying employers by the best candidates.
Thus the human resource issue is amongst the most important challenge for a commercial printers looking to diversify to monocarton packaging.
Apart from professional management, creating a skilled workforce is a equally serious challenge. Although it may be seen as a primary responsibility of professionals to create and manage a skilled workforce, the promoter needs
to invest considerable amounts of money in them (the professionals) apart from the plant and the hardware and also be ready to hand over considerable responsibility, trust and power. In can take at least five years to create a sustainable ecosystem with enough growth to retain your investments in human resources.
The plant infrastructure
The second issue is that of investment in plant, infrastructure, technology and software. A modern monocarton plant in India today has to have a minimum built up area of 100,000 square feet (9,000 square metres) and that too preferably on a single floor. The infrastructure and services must include backup power generation and an effluent treatment plant as well as compliances with safety, health and environment norms. For reasons of hygiene, kitchens and canteens should be built and housed separately. The plants must be designed to optimize the material and production workflow. There is no point in building a large plant and putting machines at right angles to each other.
Keep in mind that a monocarton plant needs to have clean and efficient space for storage of raw materials including inks, chemicals and board. It goes without saying that considerable working capital is needed to procure and keep a considerable tonnage of various varieties of paperboard.
Equipment
The investment in printing, finishing and converting equipment which must be balanced as well as redundant
is fairly large. This means that within
24 to 30 months of diversification, you need two long multicolor presses, four autoplaten diecutters, a coater, laminator and at least a couple of folder-gluers and most likely, a window patching machine. And this does not include the equipment for producing E and F micro fluted litho-laminated corrugated cartons that are a big part of the paperboard carton business today.
Of course commercial printers can leverage their existing multicolor presses. Some maintain that they can do commercial printing as well as monocarton printing and converting in the same plant. Actually this cannot work, although there may be some notable exceptions to the rule.
The presses on the commercial side of the business can back up the presses of the monocarton side but in the long term if material movement and logistics are involved, the production workflow cannot be optimized. Ultimately, a dedicated plant containing prepress, printing, coating and converting equipment has to be created. In addition, you may need to create capacity for printing and folding leaflets for inserts and outserts. An automated inspection machine for carton blanks is also needed.
Testing and documentation
Packaging buyers demand not only quality and competitive pricing but a huge amount of testing and documentation. Not only do your best practices have to be documented but you also have to document your material testing, the work in progress quality assurance and be able to issue
quality assurance with all the cartons you ship out. This means investment in labs, testing equipment and record keeping. Labs are needed for material testing and for product testing. An ink kitchen with equipment like an IGT ink printability tester, an ink mixer and a spectrophotometer for efficiently producing special and brand colors is also required. This is apart from all your press-side spectros all of which require periodic maintenance and calibration.
Another investment is in prepress, production workflow and management software. While not every commercial printers entering monocartons needs to become a full- fledged monocarton design house, a solid approach to carton structure, die-design, image handling and trapping is required. To be competitive, a sample making table is de rigueur. ERP software may be an
option at first but ultimately your customers will want browser-based access to their orders. They will appreciate very solid servers and archival systems and ERP systems. When you put together an initial investment of Rs. 20 to 60 crore and ten years of your life, you will also appreciate these.
The challenge of a monocarton diversification or even a start-up investment is to optimize it. To make and sustain this kind of investment, a plant needs to operate at least two shifts if not all three and 24 x 7. To build up sufficient work and to execute it in time profitably is not easy.
In conclusion, I have attempted to discourage the faint-hearted and those commercial printers who think that monocarton may be a simple and instantly rewarding diversification. However, for those with the vision and the stamina and the appropriate business acumen, the monocarton diversification or greenfield project can be a straightforward process.
Although I am only able to describe some of the requirements in an article addressed to commercial printers, it is surprising how few of the monocarton printers have been able to systemize their processes and plants. Why should you attempt it, then? Because you can.
Many commercial printers have installed closed circuit television systems to remotely observe various production areas. This reveals an inability to sufficiently motivate productive employee behaviour. It is a reflection of excessive numbers of employees at lower wages.
