Greenfield plant at Pantnagar Design Park at Chakan

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Parksons’ Pantnagar plant will be headed by Director of operations for North India, KN Patel and is scheduled to start-up before March 2010 with two presslines including a new Roland 700 Hiprint 6-colour plus coater. For converting, two Bobst die-cutters and two folder gluers will initiate the production of both monocartons and E-flute cartons. The expansion in Rudrapur is seen as coming closer to some of Parksons’ existing customers who have built plants in North India to take advantage of the tax benefits available to them in the Special Economic Zones there. According to Parksons’ CEO Ramesh Kejriwal, “the new plant will bring logistical benefits of multi-location supply to our customers in addition to the tax benefits that they enjoy by manufacturing in the SEZ.”

Chakan and Daman
We recently visited Parksons Packagings’ Chakan plant, a greenfield project inaugurated in April 2007. Started up with a Heidelberg XL 105 6-colour plus coater, Bobst die-cutters and folder gluers, another XL105 of similar configuration and a uniquely configured Heidelberg CD74 Duo press which is a hybrid of flexo and six offset units with a coater and interdeck UV curing were soon added. With these three presses and their ancillary converting lines, the 150,000 square foot plant is now three quarters occupied and it awaits a fourth press that will complete phase I of the Chakan project.

The converting equipment includes five die-cutters and a hot foil stamping machine with five folder gluers. The linear plant at Chakan has been designed so that a parallel structure can share the existing services for doubling capacity.

In the meantime Parkson’s Daman plant has also been expanded to 150,000 square feet with five multicolour press and converting lines. The five presses include three Heidelberg CD102 6-colour plus coaters of which one press is a combi-UV, the KBA Rapida 105 6-colour plus coater full UV press, and a Mitsubishi 5-colour. This plant is being further upgraded with a Mitsubishi 72 cm  6-colour plus coater press.

All modern board packaging companies do a certain amount of prepress, structural and packaging development work for their customers. Parksons have, over the past several months under the leadership of Chaitanya Kejriwal, invested in building up a packaging design and development centre that works both on customer projects as well as its own projects that will hopefully generate ideas and innovations that can be accessed for new packaging needs and designs.

The core staff of four at the centre is research oriented — consumer behaviour, environmental concerns as well new structural ideas, software and materials will play a part in packaging development and even the creation of intellectual property. While it is early days, and Chaitanya Kejriwal would prefer to show some of the developments before he talks about them, this is more than the usual prepress facility that we have seen in other packaging plants. It is a large and playful  space with a gallery of packaging samples meant for problem solving as well as creativity.

Deal for two manroland R700 Hiprint 6-colour plus coater presses
Parksons Packaging’s deal with manroland for the new plant in Pantnagar is for two R700 Hiprint 6-colour plus coater presses with semi-automatic plate changing and manroland’s PressManager Perfect -- production workflow software for networking and integration in a computer integrated manufacturing plant.

Production data for centralised management is stored in a database that interacts with a master database containg information about customers and preferred ink and substrate parameters for repeat work. MIS reports with graphics can be generated with production data including time for job starts and finish, wash-ups, plate-changes, and production.

Both presses include coating coating modules for dispersion coating with chrome-plated double-size impression cylinder, and a ROLAND SelectDryer for IR/Thermo air drying. The presses have an AirGlide Delivery feature which produces even stacks at high press speeds using flat sheet ascent and long sheet stabilisation path.

The machines will come pre-loaded with the TelePresence – Service Portal, an industrial PC with TelePresence software for machine diagnostics that enables remote diagnosis of the press by authorised qualified staff without visiting the actual site. The Maintenance Manager module provides individualised, condition-oriented press maintenance.

The second R700 Hiprint 6-colour plus coater on order for the Pantnagar plant will be a full interdeck UV press and will thus provide a level of technology and full back-up that Parksons Packaging has become known for.

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