Mumbai, India - Essel Propack is a leader in the laminated tube market with a 35% global market share in this packaging segment. Several years ago, the company adopted Esko's prepress and workflow solutions across its plants in India. The goal was to manage consistency in brand colours for their multinational clients. Recently, the company signed a new agreement with Esko reflecting its intention to modernize and integrate its workflow, prepress and quality practices in all their major plants located in 14 locations globally.

M. Ram Ramasamy, Chief Operating Officer of Essel Propack, says, “The Essel Group is a frontrunner when it comes to standardizing colour for global brands. With Esko’s solution, we can achieve uniform print quality across various printing processes such as offset, digital, flexo and letterpress. Before our recent contract signing at drupa 2016, our earlier agreement with Esko helped us to standardize the prepress workflow across all the plants in India (Vasind, Wada, Nalagarh and Goa) and in Poland, Germany and China—seven plants so far.”

The signing of a comprehensive global agreement between the two companies at drupa 2016 is considered a significant step for Essel Propack. One of the biggest hardware, software and service agreements concluded at the show, Essel will equip all of its their major plants located in 14 locations globally with Esko’s prepress, design and packaging management solutions. Moreover, Full HD Flexo digital imagers and solutions will be set up within 18 months across all the plants. The company is taking every possible step to detect and fix errors at the initial stages of the workflow and to automate it processes in order to enhance quality, productivity, security and time to market for its brand owner customers.

Speaking about the benefits of standardization, Ramasamy says, “The relationship of Esko and Essel Propack started 15 years ago. Since then, Esko’s solutions have helped us in maintaining quality and efficiency in reproducing brand colours to meet the local and internal customers demand. We want to achieve the highest quality and efficiency by using more or less the same software tools and equipment across all plants. That’s how standardization comes into the picture.”

With Esko’s design, prepress and workflow software and its prototyping and collaborative online tools, Essel Propack can link its existing prepress units to various manufacturing units. As part of the agreement, there will be standard tools across the globe. Ramasamy adds, “In the last few years, with the increase in consumption of tubes, Essel Group has expanded its footprint every year. Hence, automation becomes a necessity to be able to produce more files while reducing the time in supply chain management.

“Clients are involved from the development stage in visualizing the final output. This way consumer product in new and innovative laminated tubes can reach the market as quickly as possible. ’What's more, the Essel Group’s research and development team continue to secure patents in laminated tube design and production.”

John Winderam, General Manager of Esko says: “Esko is very pleased to have strengthened our relationship with Essel Propack. When two leading industry players choose to work together at this level then you can expect great results. We expect our partnership to set a new standard in the design and production of the next generation of laminated tubes.”