Ansapack, a multifaceted packaging company based in Mumbai, meets the demands of the pharmaceutical industry for its primary, secondary and tertiary packaging. Providing film, foil, folding carton and corrugated packaging materials, Ansapack is one of the few companies in South Asia, delivering these three types of packaging to its customers.
Two-thirds of the company’s business comes from supplying primary and secondary packaging materials to the vibrant Indian pharmaceutical industry. The remaining one-third of its business comes from packaging for food and dairy products and from corrugated transport packaging materials. The Rs.300 crore turnover company has 1,800 employees at its five manufacturing plants in Western India – two in Maharashtra and three in Gujarat.
As Ansapack steadily grows, it is adding to its Esko packaging prepress software modules in order to speed up and automate its workflows and processes such as its current implementation of the Esko Automation Engine tool in its primary packaging division. While the tool has been in use for the last one-and-a-half months, its full implementation will take another month. “We are not designers of packaging. We are converters in every sense of the word and because we are converters we have invested in the Esko Automation Engine tool. We used Esko in the secondary packaging division but now Ansapack is the first company in India servicing the pharma industry to apply the Esko workflow tools in the primary packaging division,” says Gautam Agarwal, joint managing director of Ansapack.
Once fully implemented, Agarwal expects Esko Automation Engine to increase customer service levels on the prepress side to speed up the process and deliverables to customers. “With this Esko tool our intention is to convey that we have something unique, which will help us in providing better services compared to what customers are getting in the market,” comments Agarwal.
Several modules improving job management
Esko’s Automation Engine includes several modules that improve job management (including milestones. The QA and viewing module has extensive prepress quality control tools including functionality to compare designs and the ability to view bitmap data. This module contains automated comparison of files in all common prepress formats, images, production files and RIP data. Separations, trim and media sizes and differences between design files and production files can be checked to confirm whether all corrections have been applied.
The modules include reporting and integration of 3D data and a Processor Module offering extensive content processing capabilities, both on native ArtPro format as on native PDF data. Automated imposition and step and repeat modules and a centralized colour integration module can also add to the rich set of tools for optimization, standardization and quality assurance of data and prepress forms such as plates and cylinders across manufacturing sites.
Quantifying the benefits of the Esko Automation Engine, Ansapack’s Agarwal says “Process time reduction was our main aim when we invested in the Esko workflow automation tool. We upgraded our existing Esko systems and spread the prepress activity beyond secondary packaging to primary packaging as well.”
Srihari Rao, sales director of Esko for India says, “We are extremely gratified to see Ansa’s growth as a leading packaging supplier. We believe that we have all the necessary pieces to add to our customer’s investments: increased automation tools, for instance, are necessary to avoid mistakes and to speed up the complete packaging supply chain. ”
Talking about plans for further investments in the Esko Automation Engine, Agarwal says that more licenses would be acquired if needed. “As we grow, the load on the Esko software will increase. If we feel we require more licenses we will surely opt for these,” he adds.
