The year 2015 was busy for Mumbai’s Paramount Art Prints as the company made few outstanding investments in hardware. Paramount which has its facility in the industrial suburb of Bhiwandi bought a Bobst Expertfold with the Accubraille attachment. It also invested in an Autoprint Checkmate 50 carton inspection system.
“For us the main purpose of going for a Bobst was the Accubraille. One has to be very careful and extremely sure that there is no breakage in brail dots. The Accubraille gives you the confidence that such errors would be eliminated,” says Surendra Tulsian, director of Paramount Art Prints. There has been a significant impact on the way of the operations process post the Bobst installation. The biggest impact has been that manual locking has been drastically reduced. Other positives, Tulsian says, are ease of operations and fabulous after-sales service from Bobst. “When it comes to consumables, Bobst is always there. When the brail dies we get a replacement within 24 hours. That is very important because we also have time commitments towards our customers,” he adds.
All these factors matter a lot for companies like Paramount which have to meet the demands of large export markets. The company derives more than 10% of its business directly from exports. Then there are indirect exports that take place via Paramount’s customers, who are some of the large pharmaceutical companies in India.
The second major investment made during the year was in an Autoprint Checkmate 50 offline carton inspection system. Paramount was the first customer in Western India to install this hardware. Coimbatore-based Autoprint has tied up with Lucid Imaging, Bengaluru for the camera technology. “It is a very good piece of equipment especially because of its offline feature. Moreover, its compact size is a great advantage,” Tulsian states.
For simple, fast and perfect alignment as well ast to run consistently at high speed, every carton has to be accurately fed and perfectly aligned so that it enters the machine in the right way
These two pieces of hardware join an already big sterling fleet of equipment. In the offset printing department Paramount has one 6-color press with coater from Heidelberg, a 5-color press without coater from Heidelberg and a single color press from Komori. It also has offline aqua and UV coaters, six semi-automatic diecutters and two cutting machines.
2016 to be a year of consolidation
With two significant investments taking place in 2015, the year 2016 is likely to be a year of consolidation for the company. “We have not decided to do anything significant in terms of investment in 2016. However, depending on how the market conditions unfold during the year, we may decide to replace one of the offset presses by the end of 2016. Also, we might look at getting into some new area of operation but in the same industry in which we are operating. We are not looking at a new industry,” Tulsian says. Commenting on the macroeconomic conditions in the Indian economy as well as the packaging industry, he says things are likely to improve in the second half of 2016. “And 2017 may be even better,” he concludes.
Packaging South Asia is the cooperating media partner for drupa 2016 which is scheduled to be held from 31 May to 10 June at Dusseldorf, Germany.
