Innova braves production challenges during the pandemic with Bobst kit

Initially, the target market was for smaller sets of boxes, but now that has moved to micro-fluted boxes of various sizes and shapes, said Akash Pabbi, one of the three directors at Innova. Vijay Pabbi and Akshay Sai are the other two directors.

Established in 1985, three young entrepreneurs, Sai and the Pabbi cousins, took charge of the company in 2018, and have since grown the company sales three-fold.

In 2019, the company made a move to a new facility in Harohalli, Bengaluru Rural, which was specifically constructed to utilise space in the best manner. Equipped with offset printing machines and post-press machinery to support mono cartons and micro fluted cartons, the company added a Bobst Novacut die-cutter in 2019, before investing in the Bobst Ambition 106 A2 folder-gluer.

The company specialises in mono cartons and micro-fluted cartons, and has the capacity to convert 500 tonnes of paper and paperboard per month. A team of quality control experts inspect every stage of production to ensure that the products adhere to international quality standards.

Looking at the flow of products and a number of new products being added, the three directors thought that it was advisable for them to look at what more they can do. “We had a vision to build a capacity to cater to the new demand that was coming from the market. Investing in a kit that would help us finish our products better, as well as serve our clients with better quality led us to invest in the Bobst Novacut,” said Akash.

The Bobst Novacut die-cutter can handle a maximum sheet size of 1,060x760mm at a speed of 8,000 sph capable of handling paper, carton board as well as corrugated boards of up to 4mm.

Vijay added that though the pre-pandemic period after the Bobst Novacut was installed was a learning period, the Bobst die-cutter certainly came in handy. “It fell in line with the sudden three-fold surge in packaging demand during the pandemic. It was quick and the quality was superb. We had no complaints at all. All the maintenance activities were carried out on time.”

In terms of productivity, the Bobst die-cutter gave a solid advantage over the manual punching machines. “What took 14 hours to produce with 14 persons, can now be produced in an hour with just three people operating the machine,” said Akshay Sai.

 However, the next challenge that Innova faced was how was it going to do all the gluing of cartons, particularly the corrugated cartons, which the normal Indian-make machine, Sai said, were unable to handle. “That’s when we decided to invest in the Bobst Ambition folder-gluer.”

The Bobst Ambition A2 folder gluer is capable of handling carton board of up to 800 gsm, and corrugated N, F and E flute type and can produce straight line as well as crash-lock bottom boxes at a maximum speed of up to 300 mtr/min.

“The quality was slightly inconsistent with the previous machine, but we were able to resolve the issues such as fishtailing and cross-pasting, with the Bobst folder-gluer. The two Bobst kits complement each other. We have been able to up our production levels to handle 500 tonnes per month,” said Sai.

Vijay added, “We are very satisfied with Bobst in terms of the support we have received whenever we faced any issue and their service engineers along with the sales team are well trained, which has helped us in terms of knowledge and learning about the machine.”