The future for packaging printing is brighter than ever, but printers can only succeed if they refuse to be boxed in. The on-the-go lifestyle of today's work-force is driving up consumption and making packaging printing even more indispensable, but a forward-looking approach is needed if printers want to profit from it.

When economies grow, people will buy more products, they will shop more. More supermarkets and other shops will emerge. In these shops and supermarkets, you cannot just throw all the products you sell on a pile or hang on a hook. You need to put it on a shelf. You need to display it nicely so that people notice your product and will actually buy. This means: Boxes are needed. Boxes need to be printed and printed well. Satisfying this huge demand may look easy at first glance. However, not every printer has the ability to meet the high quality standards set by the customers. The trend for shorter print runs resulting from retailers having little room to keep stock of products, and additional packaging security measures to protect customers' brands from imitations add to the challenges that printers face. Complicating matter is the growing emphasis on environment protection – a must-do for established brands that would like to pro-ject themselves as socially responsible.

Production efficiency
Having access to topnotch presses and applications, like those provided by manroland, certainly does help. manroland knows best how to help printers in cop-ing with the demands: production efficiency, quality, and consistency as well as ability to differentiate. Production efficiency has plenty to do with a streamlined production management, short makeready times, quality assurance, and format, and these can benefit from digital workflows. Print shops have to rationalize order management procedures in order to boost the performance in the print value chain. A highly efficient process management system is needed, focusing on the whole production process with integration of prepress, press, and postpress as well as a link to business processes like cost calculation, quotations and even links to cus-tomers or print buyers.

Security of investment
It is good to consider where the cost of your company is actually sitting. Most of the cost in the printing company is related to paper, other materials and personnel. The total finance cost of the press is about ten percent of the total cost of operation. Therefore, when investing in production equipment, it makes sense to look carefully to which extent your new equipment can help you to reduce your paper cost and personnel. It could be better to spend a bit more on a machine that enables you to reduce paper cost, personnel cost and maintenance cost than buying a lower-cost machine that does not eventually give you a big advantage in reducing your total production cost.

Safeguarding resources
If you as a printer do not care about the environment, you will simply not get a job from any well known brand owner. The manroland ecometer lets you determine po-tential savings. It calculates the required energy and resources based on specific information such as machine type, production volume, and paper consumption and offers specific suggestions for sustainably improving printing processes. In addition, it reveals the total savings that are possible over a year or over the total service life of a press. In addition to representing energy efficiency, reduced emis-sions, and resource savings, the ecometer provides an ecological assessment for predefined press configurations and indicates savings for carbon dioxide, energy, and the cost of materials. Cutting down on carbon emission is an important initial step in becoming eco-friendly. manroland works with consulting company ClimatePartner to calculate the carbon footprint.