“I think flexo is both the most challenging industry, and the most rewarding. The more you put in, the greater the benefits,” said Shyam Sundar, partner at NS Digital Flexo. Sundar described NS Digital’s service offering as “all things flexo — wide-web, labels, folding cartons, corrugated.”

A notable feature of the company’s philosophy is the effort and time it puts into building relationships with customers and showing them the potential of the Flexcel NX System. “We engage with each customer so that we can see things from their perspective, and understand their current capabilities and practices. Then we show them how simple adjustments to their production practices — fingerprinting the press, for example — can improve efficiency without additional investments or press set-ups, because if we can work with the available resources, we save customers time and money,” Sundar said. “Next, we explain the further improvements and enhanced benefits achievable with the Flexcel NX plates — how we can change anilox rollers and inks, reduce impression and generally introduce better control into the press environment.”

With this, it’s relatively easy for NS Digital to help customers become more efficient, Sundar said. “The biggest benefit for us is the simplicity of making plates. The flexo process can have many variables, but the Flexcel either eliminates them or makes managing them really simple, which yields substantial savings throughout the whole packaging printing process. So as a service provider, we can be confident we can provide customers with consistent, repeatable results. It also makes it easier to solve any print issues that arise, because we can eliminate the plates as a cause straightaway. With other solutions, the investigation is more complex — is it the file, or the software, or processing, or exposure, or the press?”

Mohan Rao, partner at NS Digital Flexo, singled out two features of the Flexcel. “The Kodak Tiff Assembler Plus software — TAP 5.0 — is a fantastic product that makes our life easier, from layout optimisation to automating job settings. And Digicap NX Patterning is a huge advantage. We can use it to create a ‘micro anilox’ on the plate, which produces efficient ink transfer and overcomes the usual challenges of maintaining ink density and controlling dot gain. Used in conjunction with press fingerprinting, it makes it easy to select the best pattern for each job.”

NS Digital Flexo is part-owned by Mumbai-based prepress solutions provider Numex Blocks, who also provide technical expertise.

On the most noticeable trends in flexo at present, Sundar said, “Gravure-to-flexo conversion, of course, but there’s also a big opportunity for flexo to take label work from offset. This is booming already, and there’s more growth to come, with more offset label players looking to have at least one flexo label press. For a tradeshop like us, this is good news on two fronts. First, there’s the challenge of helping many small label players produce complex jobs, which will keep the market engaged and growing. And second, there’s the demand for faster turnarounds, which is only possible with the Flexcel.”