Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I’m pleased to be here with Jon Drennan, who is Operations Director for Chesapeake in the pharmaceutical and healthcare packaging part of Chesapeake, which is a big company, right.

Jon Drennan: Yeah, sure. Hi, Cary.

Cary Sherburne: Hi, it’s good to see you again. You know, we talked in early March in London and our viewers can go back and take a look at that video from the Pantone Live launch but now we’re, you know, several months into the project and I’d like to kind of understand what have you been doing with Pantone Live, what’s the reception of brand owners to the concept and maybe you can talk a little bit about how it’s affecting your business and theirs.

Jon Drennan: Okay. Thanks very much. Yeah, it’s been very successful since London. We’ve had a huge amount of interest in the launch for our customers and converters alike. And we’ve been able to support Xrite and Pantone again within drupa events, produce some packaging to further demonstrate the technologies that have been offered to us through Pantone Live. So really for us it was – it’s become very, very simple. Our customers, we’ve managed now to transfer seven of our ten largest customers to Pantone Live.

Cary Sherburne: Wow.

Jon Drennan: Fully implemented. So that’s been hugely successful. Very well received. And about 50 percent of our volume is now running through these technologies.

Cary Sherburne: Wow. And so it works and it’s real and so what are the – from the brand owners perspective, what are the – why do they buy into it? What’s the key value proposition for them?

Jon Drennan: So the key thing for the brand owner is across their range, their portfolio within a brand family, we’re able to deliver very, very consistent color in terms of packaging. Neither the colors are fully digitalized and that information can be sent all the way through the supply chain from artwork through to the presses, through to the actual ink on paper. It’s made the brand owners the confidence is growing as the months go by and it’s made the brand owners very, very happy.

Cary Sherburne: And whether they’re doing paper labels on cans or they’re doing flexible packaging or pouches or shrink sleeve, it doesn’t really matter because you can insure…

Jon Drennan: Absolutely. Because the digitalized and because the special values are available across the supply chain, the target is removable. The prints and process might change the media might change, but the target always remains constant. This is the most important message for converters like myself the propositions very simple. We’re trying to return the best quality, most consistent products for every investment in raw material that we make. So we want to deliver something that gives the customer a no reason all all not be confident in the supply chain.

Cary Sherburne: Of course. And then from a – two perspectives. From a time-to-market perspective from the brand owner, for the brand owner, and then for you in terms of cycle time and cost. How does it help?

Jon Drennan: Absolutely. I think we’re in a situation now where we actively invite customers to bring the design file to one of our sites. Within approximately an hour of them arriving and us being able to have a discussion we’re able to print the color accurate proof for them. So they’re able to see live with their own eyes exactly what that product will look like. We can guarantee the products will come out that way actually within production on the press and we have a live example very recently where a customer visited a site, within an hour we had a live color accurate proof. With a further hour we actually had the products on the press.

Cary Sherburne: Oh, my gosh. And so do you think this will reduce – actually reduce the number of hard copy proofs you’re doing and the number of press checks you have to have?

Jon Drennan: I think our plan is by the end of the year press checks will be a thing of the past. We really see that through digital to workflow we’ll be able to move away from that concept completely and with the move through currently hard proof and eventually soft proof, we calibrate the screens you can see a very, very automated workflow in the future.

Cary Sherburne: So when you look at what you’ve done in terms of requiring additional instrumentation from Xrite an being involved in the Pantone Live initiatives, so when they say color is right the first time or right every time that’s an accurate statement?

Jon Drennan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m here promoting it because I do believe in the concepts and I think we’ve got a lot of proof now and we’ve really moved on from the launch in London where we had a system that we could measure color and now we’ve managed to transfer that stage further by purchasing more Xrite technologies and through IQC and other instrumentation. We now have a database that proves beyond any shadow of a doubt of the reduction of coloration that has been delivered.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great. Thank you very much for sharing your story.

Jon Drennan: Thank you, Cary. Thanks.