Flexo or Digital: A cost analysis of label-printing technology | Domino Printing

Founded in 1978, Domino has established a global reputation for the continual development and manufacture of its total coding and printing technologies that meet the needs of manufacturers and sets new industry standards in quality and reliability.

Through a global network of 25 subsidiary offices and in excess of 200 distributors, the Domino Group operates in over 120 countries employing over 2,600 people worldwide with manufacturing facilities situated in UK, China, Germany, India, Sweden and USA. On 11 June 2015, Domino became an autonomous division of Brother Industries Limited. Brother Industries Limited is a public company based in Nagoya Japan and is listed on the Japanese Stock Exchange (6448:Tokyo).

Which technology is best-suited to the evolving label printing market - flexo or digital? To find out, we ran a statistical analysis of production data from a number of label converters. The results will help you determine which technology best suits your business and the work you undertake.

Considering new label printing technology? Wondering how different flexo and digital technologies compare in terms of production time, cost and quality? Curious if new technologies really are better than tried and trusted legacy systems?

We were too. So we conducted a study.

First, we gathered real production data from a selection of businesses using different label printing technologies. Then we ran a statistical analysis to see how the technologies compared and summarised our findings in a white paper. You can download it here.

The label converting market is following a clear global trend. While print volume overall continues to rise, run lengths are declining. Mass production is being replaced by more personalisation, more versioning and more jobs due to a radical change in consumer buying habits. Just-in-time manufacturing is becoming the industry standard and an eight-hour turnaround from order to delivery is becoming commonplace.

That puts pressure on the traditional ways of working. In today’s production environment, the pressure is on label converters to minimise the time your press is stopped – the total production time is key to profitability. Being able to print a job in 20 minutes is often less important than the 60 minutes or more that may elapse between your press stopping and starting again.

Our white paper is designed to help businesses like yours determine the most appropriate label printing technology for the type of work you commonly undertake. That’s important because the right technology will save you both time and money. By summarising real production data provided by a number of label converters, we have identified the crossover points at which different technologies become most effective. That data is valuable whether you are considering modernising your print technology, or if you simply want to check how your current technology measures up to the latest systems.