ZRP Printing Group – X GAMUT
Expanded Color Gamut Printing: Print Spot Colors without Using Spot Inks
CGS ORIS Case Study: Automating extended color gamut printing for offset, digital and flexo presses.
The ZRP Printing Group Co., Ltd. is one of the top 20 printers in China and the biggest manroland user worldwide. The company was founded in 1978 and has four production houses in China today. The largest has an area of 1,080,000 square feet.
The group has approx. 3000 employees and is responsible for 120 brand customers. Many of them are part of the FMCG companies. ZRP has had its focus on the offset market, but is now expanding its digital and flexo printing business. They are specialized in customized industry solutions and produce high-quality consumer packaging products with outstanding finishings on several materials as well as promotional tools and smart e-commerce solutions. ZRP is a member of the Global Packaging Alliance (GPA).
Spot and brand colors are very important for the global player and the multi-national corporations ZRP is working with. The unique spot colors attract attention and help to build a strong brand presence. In addition, intelligent custom solutions and promotional materials are increasingly in demand as well as special effects in food packaging and other individualized campaigns. In one of the projects conducted for a famous cookie brand, customers were able to customize the product online and to track the delivery enroute.
In 2004 CGS ORIS joined forces with ZRP to increase their capacity for providing individualized solutions tailored to their customers‘ requirements. ZRP’s first CGS ORIS integration was COLOR TUNER. After substantial investments in digital printing, they expanded upon their CGS ORIS solutions with the use of X GAMUT, for the implementation of multi-channel, extended color gamut, and fixed ink set digital printing.
During their large project with a multi-national consumer goods corporation the power of X GAMUT was impressively demonstrated. Using the new multi-channel, Extended Color Gamut (ECG) functionality, ZRP was able to import, measure and re-separate 13 spot colors used in air freshener packaging samples and to convert these spot colors easily and reliably into a fixed ink set comprising of CMYK, orange, green and violet – while completely maintaining visual brand identity.
The benefits they gained from all of this were enormous: Huge time savings owing to reduced ink change-overs, job change-overs, press wash-up and press down times as well as more flexibility resulting from the ability to print jobs including different spot colors on the same press and in the same run.
As a result, ZRP was able to reduce production and delivery times and to increase overall productivity. This allowed them to offer their services to more customers and at more competitive prices. Finally, costs could be cut considerably because of reduced (spot) ink consumption, less ink to be kept on stock and less ink waste. All this allowed our customer to maximize their profits. This project and the calculations which were made during the tests showed that ZRP was able to save 376 hours of total press time, 20 percent of ink costs and RMB 370,000 of printing costs (approx. EUR 45,000) during the first half of 2017, which means that productivity could be increased by almost 50 percent – just with one single extended color gamut print project.