Delhi-based Prateek Metal Industries was started nearly 25 years ago by Preetam Arora. The company is now run by him along with his brother, Manoj Arora. Initially, the company’s focus area was metal printing on manually-fed offset presses. With time, Prateek invested in screen printing machines and a few years ago the company started a label business ‒ Prateek Graphics. In April this year, the company invested in a brand new Konica Minolta AccurioLabel 190 press, making it the first AccurioLabel press imported into India featuring the Brotech Graphics winder system that Konica Minolta announced during Labelexpo India in September 2018. Prateek provides labels to the home appliances sector. Usha and Bajaj are two of the regular customers for the company.
Apart from the new Konica Minolta label press, the company owns 10 screen printing machines. Explaining why the company chose to adopt digital technology, Manoj says, “We have been using digital for the last three years. We were working on a smaller digital press, a 13 x19 inch Xerox press. Apart from these machines, we have two roll-to-roll flex printing machines for printing vinyls ‒ an HP Latex 360 and a Roland machine.”
Power-packed features of the new AccurioLabel 190
With the new digital label press, the company plans to meet the growing demand for new-age label printing, short-run jobs and variable data work. The press purchased by Prateek also has an AccurioPro Print Manager, which helps deliver higher speeds and increases the productivity of the machine by providing image stability. It can print on several substrates, such as non-tack paper, tack paper, synthetic paper, PP and PET of various thicknesses. Overall, the press has been specially optimized for minimizing paper wastage, improving media handling and managing the jobs conveniently.
A 4X productivity increase to improve profitability
“This press will help us improve profitability and as the brands move towards greater personalization, this machine will help us service a large chunk of brand owners. It reduces time to print and is also capable of printing on several media. All these features of the AL 190 will help us increase productivity by four times.
“In terms of profitability, we expect a 25% jump with the new press. The compact size of this press was another driving factor in choosing it as well its ability to cut the output into sheets. After using this digital press for at least a year, we may also purchase a new conventional narrow web flexo label press. Although there are a few concerns for us with this machine, we are working along with the Konica Minolta team to try and eliminate these and achieve complete satisfaction,” Manoj explains.
Most of Prateek’s jobs are limited to CMYK and hence it purchased the new 4-color press. Talking about printing on clear films, Manoj says, “To print a base white, we print the CMYK first and then go back to our screen printing machine for the white in the background.” During the interaction, Manoj also elaborated on his plans to move to a completely new facility in the future. Prateek’s current production unit is a rented space, which has been very efficiently utilized. Going ahead, it plans to build a greenfield plant possibly across the river in Noida.
