Blind Study Confirms Harper's Digital Anilox Technology Achieves Global Quality Standards
Charlotte, N.C., October 4, 2005 – Global anilox supplier Harper Corporation of America announces completion of a blind quality control study, where its operations in Charlotte, N.C.; Green Bay, Wis.; and Bangkok, Thailand, received and filled fictitious anilox roll orders without the awareness of manufacturing management.
“This testing program, which included a total of nine anilox rolls, was developed to verify Harper’s digital cell volume manufacturing systems globally, therefore validating the systems all the way to press,” said Ron Harper, CEO of Harper Corporation. “While our quality control teams and ISO systems provide assurance within each manufacturing facility, comparing the end products of these facilities ‘in press’ is the true acid test of quality on a global scale. This, too, provides our OEM partners and their new press customers with added confidence in situations where new press anilox sets are supplemented with rolls from another Harper location once the press is installed.”
The test involved the manufacturing and testing of three 10” Mark Andy rolls, with screen counts of 400, 600 and 800 lines, and 60-degree hexagonal Platinum® surface engravings. The anilox volumes included Echotopography™ Digital Volume (EDV) measuring 3.7, 2.5 and 1.8 BCM (billion cubic microns), respectively.
Only after manufacturing was complete on the Platinum® laser-engraved rolls did each manufacturing location receive the shipping destination – Harper’s Charlotte, N.C. corporate facility. Once the rolls arrived, there were no additional inspections made before the in-press test. The anilox rolls were taken to the Flexographic Trade School and run one after the other, in sequence, by line screen. Again, testing was blind until the final density results were obtained. The ink color run for density testing was cyan, with inks provided by Environmental Inks, Inc. During the press run, no special effort was made to match color between rolls, but rather to focus on obtaining good, equalized impression.
Density results for the 400-line, 3.7 BCM anilox rolls were 2.06, 2.09 and 2.1, indicating a total variation range of 1.9%. For the 600-line anilox rolls, density results were 2.03, 2.06 and 2.08, or a variation range of 2.4%. Densities for the 800-line anilox rolls were 1.95, 1.96 and 2.0, resulting in a variation range of 2.5%.
“With a maximum color variation of 2.5% in tests that involved nine different rolls,” said Pete Hartman, a former printing plant manager and Harper Corporation’s vice president of sales, “our sales and service teams are absolutely certain that we can achieve a match print for any global color from any one of our worldwide operations. While we have always been confident of this, and our customer satisfaction has attested to it, running these tests proves it absolutely and without doubt.”
Art Ehrenburg, Harper’s vice president of operations, attributes the results to the manufacturing team’s relentless pursuit of accurate quality measurement systems in the laser engraving set-up process. He explains, “Ever since we adopted EDV measurement for the calibration burns on every single anilox roll we engrave, there has been a quantifiable change in volume consistency. With our EDV system, there is no human variation, as there is with a microscope. By statistical analysis testing, we determined that measurement accuracy would improve by 100%. When we adopted EDV as our set-up measurement device, though costly, it allowed us to guarantee color matches between anilox rolls made on different lasers and at different locations. The result is that we can globally guarantee color matches for a color such as Coke Red, in multiple printing presses.”
For additional information, contact Pete Hartman at 704-588-3371 ext. #297, petehartman@HarperImage.com.
###
