Faridabad-based Narendra Gravure delivers tailor-made add-ons and solutions for flexible packaging converters. With in-house design, fabrication, and assembly it produces a variety of laminators and coaters to enhance its Gravotechnica brand with both technical and cosmetic improvements. The new generation management, in the person of its vice-president Shrey Agrawal, says the company is aiming to redesign a number of its products. The plan is to offer more ancillary machines that can help meet the end-to-end needs of flexible packaging converters.
In an interaction with Packaging South Asia, Agrawal said he joined the business around two years ago and after spending several months familiarizing himself with the industry and attending exhibitions, he got into the commissioning of the machines on the customer shop floors. “The experience gave me a better understanding of the ground realities for propelling our research and development and the re-design of future machines. Since joining the company, I have also been able to add trained and skilled resources to streamline our processes, marketing, and servicing.”
The company is hoping to come up with a new product portfolio. “I think, the focus is shifting towards high-speed and wider format presses. Earlier, the industry used to consider 130 meters a minute as a good speed, but that has changed with more customized features and demands, depending on the kind of orders a converter receives. There is a significant shift in machine and market literacy among the converters. Initially, they would buy a start-up machine and subsequently ask for add-ons. Now they approach us with a full list of requirements,” Agrawal explains.
Agrawal adds, “We worked on our coating machines in the last two years and have successfully launched a double-head coating machine and now we are receiving orders for a 4-head in-register coating machine that we are currently developing for Uflex – it is a huge special purpose machine.”
“When we talk about our conventional rotogravure printing, we have developed it further in the past two years,” Agrawal said. “We have added an automatic reel changer for the gravure presses and made other significant improvements. Although the reel changer technology is not something exclusive or new, for our lamination machines it is among our USPs.”
Agarwal explains that in the FMCG segment, for a pan masala brand with large volumes, the bottleneck is not in the printing but in the lamination process. He says this is where the changeover time impacts efficiency in production and the Gravotechnica solutions work well.
According to Agrawal, competition has grown in the packaging industry, resulting in a mentality or attitudinal change among the converters who realize that they won’t be able to remain viable, providing the required solutions without high-efficiency machines. “Based on this shift in demand, we are offering more customized solutions with enhanced automation that would require less manual intervention. We have a big basket of machines in our portfolio to help the end-to-end needs of a converter right from printing, coating, lamination, slitting, inspection, doctoring, and more,” he said.
