Janesville, WI, June 27, 2007 – GOEX Corp., the Janesville, Wis.-based manufacturer of printable custom plastic sheet, is pleased to offer card printers and producers a new extruded plastic sheet with the magnetic stripe already incorporated.
The ubiquitous plastic card has become a staple of global commerce, thanks to the presence of a magnetic stripe (“mag stripe”) capable of storing data and of being read when swiped through the reading heads of ATMs, identification devices and point-of-sale hardware to retrieve secure information stored on the card itself or in a remote database.
The virtually endless uses of magnetic striping supply the momentum, in part, to a booming market for plastic card printing. What’s not so obvious is that the cost to apply mag stripes by conventional means is significant, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more annually for a high-volume card printer - without taking into account the knowledge, capital or personnel needed to enter this promising market. But what if printers could buy plastic sheet with the mag stripe already applied (“pre mag”), and reap the benefits in terms of material cost savings and increased throughput?
GOEX Corp. is the developer and sole supplier of pre-mag stripe plastic sheet, an innovative product that can shorten the path to profitability for plastic card printers and producers.
Simple and Less Costly
Mag tape lanes traditionally are applied by overlaminating film that is temporarily applied directly to plastic sheets. These multi-sheet “books” are fed into a laminating press that bonds the sheets together under heat and pressure. An alternate method involves using tape machines to apply a mag stripe on individual cards. Neither is an efficient or cost-effective option, given the time (the “bottleneck” process in mag-card production), space, equipment and personnel needed to carry out these additional processes.  
The vast majority of card applications require a high-quality plastic card with the mag stripe incorporated. However, the complex and costly traditional processes of applying magnetic tape typically are the constraining operations of a card producer. By dispensing with the laminating film and extra process steps of lamination, GOEX produces a much simpler card construction, whose finished cost is significantly less.
”Continuous processes are for more efficient than intermittent ones,” says Bob Waddell, Vice President of Sales, GOEX. “We eliminate a card producer’s bottleneck by applying the mag onto a continuous web of plastic within the extrusion process to tolerances established by ISO card standards. Depending on sheet size, pre-mag sheet can be produced in configurations from one to 12 lanes per sheet, based on the size and shape of card to be produced.”
The card-printer with no space to spare has a real issue with adding equipment. The printer trying to do more with fewer employees faces a similar dilemma when he attempts to expand into the potentially lucrative card market. Manufacturing efficiency is about subtracting processes, not adding them. GOEX mag stripe plastic sheet carries a slightly higher price tag compared to normal card sheet-stock. However, the customer will save money because the total cost to produce a printed mag stripe sheet is actually lower, compared with the overall cost of tape-laying and laminating equipment. Cards produced with GOEX pre-mag sheet are significantly less expensive than traditional overlay and laminated cards.
“GOEX is driven to find ways to add value to our products,” Says Waddell. “Pre-mag sheet is another example of this.”
GOEX produces .024-.030-gauge pre-mag stripe plastic in CAROM 45 white PVC and CAROM 50/60 clear PVC.