【Case Sharing】A brand packaging factory increased its production capacity by 30% through a hot stamping foil slitting machine

1. Customer background and core pain points

• Customer: A domestic brand packaging and printing enterprise, focusing on high-end gift boxes, luxury packaging, tobacco and alcohol labels and other high-quality printed products.

• Core business: A large number of post-press processes such as hot stamping and silver stamping are used, and the consumption of hot stamping foil is huge.

• Pain Point Analysis:

1. Production efficiency bottleneck: The original equipment has a slow slitting speed and average accuracy, which cannot keep up with the production rhythm of the front-end printing machine and the back-end hot stamping machine, which often causes the production process to "wait for materials".

2. Serious material waste: Traditional slitting methods have high loss rates (burrs, crooked cuts, broken belts) and cannot handle joints or defective parts in the coil, resulting in a large amount of expensive hot stamping foil being wasted.

3. Insufficient flexibility: Orders are increasingly trending towards "small batches, multiple varieties", and when frequently changing slitting specifications, traditional equipment debugging time is long and preparation work is cumbersome.

4. High labor dependence: Operators are required to be on duty for a long time to judge the quality of slitting based on experience, which is high in labor costs and difficult to ensure consistency.

2. Solution: Introduce high-performance intelligent hot stamping foil slitting machine

After thorough market research, the factory finally introduced a fully automatic hot stamping foil slitting machine that integrates a number of advanced technologies.

• Highlights of the core functions of the device:

◦ High-precision tension control system: Ensure that the foil coil tension is constant during the slitting process, which fundamentally eliminates problems such as wrinkling and tensile deformation.

◦ Visual inspection and automatic correction system: Real-time monitoring of foil edges and automatic adjustment of tool position to ensure absolute straightness and consistency of slitting lines.

◦ Multifunctional tool holder design: Supports various slitting methods such as straight knives and round knives, making it easy to handle hot stamping foil of different materials and thicknesses.

◦ PLC intelligent control and touch screen interface: preset slitting scheme, one-click call of different order parameters, greatly shortening the order change and debugging time.

◦ Automatic waste disposal and winding device: Realize full automation of slitting and winding, reducing manual intervention.

3. Analysis of post-implementation results

After the introduction of the new equipment, the production efficiency and economic benefits have been immediately improved:

1. Significant 30% increase in production capacity:

◦ The slitting speed has been increased from 150 m/min to 200+ m/min.

◦ The extremely short order change time (reduced from 15 minutes to 3 minutes) significantly increases the effective operation time of the equipment.

◦ The slitting process is no longer a bottleneck in the production line, and the overall production process is smoother.

2. Significant Reduction of Material Costs:

◦ The slitting loss rate has been reduced from more than 5% to less than 1%.

◦ High-precision slitting avoids defective products in the hot stamping process caused by crooked cutting and burrs.

◦ Only one material savings recovered a considerable proportion of the equipment investment cost within half a year.

3. Improved Product Quality and Consistency:

◦ The edge of the slitted foil roll is flat and burr-free, and it runs smoothly on the high-speed hot stamping machine, and the hot stamping pattern is clearer and the gloss is high, which greatly improves the product yield rate.

◦ It meets the almost demanding quality requirements of high-end customers for the hot stamping effect.

4. Optimize manpower allocation and reduce labor intensity:

◦ Realize "one person operates multiple machines", and the operator only needs to be responsible for feeding, entering parameters and inspecting.

◦ Free experienced employees from repetitive labor and engage in more important quality control roles.

4. Summary and enlightenment

The success of this technological transformation shows that for processing enterprises that rely heavily on specific consumables, the return on investment (ROI) of investing in advanced equipment in the pretreatment of consumables (such as slitting) may be very high.

• Strategic value: Not only purchasing a machine, but also improving the efficiency of a key link, revitalizing the production capacity of the entire production line, and enhancing the company's ability to respond quickly to urgent and difficult orders.

• Industry trends: Intelligent and automated equipment is the inevitable direction of the transformation and upgrading of the printing and packaging industry. Through "machine substitution" and "data empowerment", enterprises can establish core advantages in efficiency, cost and quality in the fierce market competition.

This case provides a valuable model for peer companies, showing that accurate equipment investment is a powerful engine that drives enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency and achieve high-quality development.