St Albans - Nene Packaging has installed a Zünd S3 digital cutting table at its Northampton factory, enabling it to produce packaging and display samples for customers of all sizes.    

As an approved supplier for Tesco and producer of POS and floor displays for other large supermarket and retail names, Nene Packaging accommodates customers with large budgets, but its ageing CAD tables and screen-printing equipment meant small businesses were being priced out. 

"Our two CAD tables were antiquated, slow and limited to cutting out plain cardboard," explains Nene Packaging's Owner, Rob Lugmayer. "To produce low-volume runs our customers needed to spend £100 to £200 on tooling costs, which made it impossible for smaller businesses. 

"Furthermore we've experienced significant customer demand for digitally printed, full-sized mock-ups. We needed an upgrade to drive forward the marketplace."

In March 2016 Zünd UK distributor CMYUK supplied an ex-display Zünd S3 to replace one of the CAD tables, alongside a new EFI VUTEk wide-format printer, which alleviates prohibitive tooling costs as well as speeding up the sample-making process and enabling short production runs.

"We'd heard good things about Zünd and CMYUK so went to the supplier when the time was right to upgrade to a digital table," says Rob Lugmayer. "CMYUK was able to offer a very good deal on the Zünd and printer together because they work so well hand in hand."

He adds that the Nene Packaging team went to Zünd UK's dedicated demonstration suite in St Albans to see the Zünd S3 in action. 

"Our designers were really impressed; it will benefit them no end and allow them to do things they couldn't do before," he says. "It's more than a sample table, it's a sophisticated production machine and design table, giving additional skill sets to members of staff in the Nene Packaging factory."

The Zünd S3 features a camera system that reads registration dots printed outside the main printing area and cuts accordingly – quickly, safely and efficiently to reduce waste materials. Like all Zünd cutters it offers modular tooling, enabling automated processing of a wide variety of materials up to 25mm thick, making it ideal for both Nene Packaging's POS and display sample production and its general brown-box work for engineering parts. It also features a compact footprint and is supplied with Zünd UK's nationwide support as standard. 

"Nene Packaging is now able to open its business to a range of customers requiring samples and short-run production, in addition to its long established screen-printing and converting services," says Peter Giddings, Sales Director, Zünd Plotting Systems (UK) Ltd. "It will offer greater production speeds and open up some really interesting design avenues – we're interested to see what they achieve with it."

Rob Lugmayer adds that Nene Packaging may replace its remaining CAD cutter with a second Zünd digital system at a later date, having been consistently impressed with the first installation. "We should have bought one years ago," he says.