SP Ultraflex, in the year 2025, is celebrating its 40th year in the slitting and rewinding industry, along with some enduring partnerships built on trust, innovation, and unwavering customer focus.
One such story begins when TCPL, one of India’s largest packaging printers, is already running five SP machines in its Silvassa plant, and recently bought a sixth one. This order was for the web inspection rewinding (WIR REV) machine, a crucial link in the flexible packaging process, positioned as it is between the processes of printing and lamination.
As its primary function, the WIR REV identifies print defects before lamination, enabling converters to remove them before the cost of additional substrates and adhesives is added. Additionally, by feeding defect-free material to the slitting line, it enhances the slitter’s operational efficiency, thereby ensuring uninterrupted, high-speed runs.
TCPL already had one WIR REV from a year ago, running on their shop floor. Incidentally, that machine also included a micro-perforation setup, to create tiny holes for jobs such as flour packaging for logistical reasons as well as to enable the air entrapped during packing to escape. Other than this feature being excluded from the scope, the new machine was ordered with the same scope as the previously supplied machine, which included –
- Edge trimming and a multi-slit attachment, intended to offload some workload from the slitter and enhance overall productivity. An essential component of SP’s version of such a slitting provision is its hybrid rewind system, which enables selection of the optimum rewinding mode, depending on the application being run.
- Shaftless rewind, for quick and effortless reel loading and unloading, when the machine is being used for web inspection.
- Shafted rewind, to produce finished reels (for supply to the customer) free from the marks of core holding mechanisms in the core edges, when the machine is being used to slit.
The machine also featured a waste rewind system, which not only keeps the shop floor neat by compacting defective material in reel form but also provides valuable insights data on material wastage, analysis of which enables the converters to refine their upstream printing process.
As in the case of the previous machine, rewinding MDO PE, a most tricky substrate, was a key objective in buying the machine. The inherent gauge variation in this substrate makes it very difficult to handle and in the earlier supplied machine, the winding quality was just about acceptable at 150- 200 mpm speed.
During one of the team meetings at SP Ultraflex, which happened to be just after having completed the pre-dispatch customer trials of this machine, the discussion moved on to discuss this project. In line with their standard practice, the team updated their MD about the outcome of the trials.
Here is a summary of the discussion thereafter:
“MD- At what speed was the machine run?
Team- 200 mpm
MD – And what about the speed of the machine we last supplied?
Team- The same
MD- The same? Even after a year? Where then is the improvement that every customer has come to expect from SP?”
That sent the ball rolling. The team went back to the machine, observing the limitations that restricted the machine’s speed. A methodical, step-by-step approach, followed by brainstorming sessions, enabled the team to come up with a mechanism that was sensitive to the random gauge variations of the substrate and took automatic, real time and continuous corrective action, allowing the machine speed to be increased from 150- 200 mpm to 300 mpm without any slack or wrinkles on the substrate, going on to produce finished reels of better quality than seen before. The earlier supplied machine required the operator to make these adjustments manually. Knowing that MDO PE gauge variation is random, one can well imagine how effective this solution was!
This intervention delayed the machine by a couple of weeks, under tremendous pressure from the customer’s end. The team had to work on holidays and load the machine after working hours to make up for some of the lost time. The site installation took an additional 2 days to fine-tune the new mechanism under the production environment. Again, under tremendous production pressure.
But the end result was a more productive machine that delivered better quality finished reels, a more user-friendly machine, and a machine that exceeded the customer’s expectations, opening up an existing bottleneck in the plant’s operations.
This story isn’t just about a machine. It’s about mutual trust, customer centricity, and the pursuit of excellence that drives everything we do at SP Ultraflex.
