In September last year, PennPac Company, a flexible packaging film provider and contract slitting company located in Manheim, Pennsylvania, installed a high-speed, compact Titan ER610 cantilever slitter as part of a multi-year capital equipment upgrade programme for its slitting and rewinding operations. The company, dedicated to providing flexible solutions for its customers, also decided to install a much larger 2.5m wide Atlas CW800 slitter rewinder in April this year, with individual rewind stations. PennPac believes this new additional slitting capacity has enabled it to continue to offer the reliability and flexibility its customers need and deserve.
PennPac was established in 1995 and processes flexible packaging films destined for printing, as well as laminating for flexible packaging materials. PennPac’s products are used in food handling, packaging and other end-user applications and are applied as packaging for snack foods, breads, CD and box overwraps, roll labels and more.
“My first experience with a Titan slitter was when we bought a second-hand SR5 machine a couple of years ago,” explained Bill Palmer, president and CEO of PennPac. “We had the machine spec upgraded through Atlas and the local Bobst Group North America customer service and support team in Charlotte, NC, which was quite an investment. The slitter performed extremely well, so it was a very worthwhile project but we realised soon after that to further grow the business, we needed more of the latest high-speed slitting technology from Titan to replace our older equipment. Re-building equipment is not an option in today’s competitive, high server demands of the market place,” he continued.
Keeping in mind the needs of his customers and the industry demands, Mr Palmer compared two or three other slitter manufacturers and confirmed the order for a new 1,650mm (65in) wide Titan ER610 slitter during the summer of 2009.
“We have been so impressed with the performance of the new ER610, but our customers are even happier. The slit reel quality is far superior to what we were able to deliver in the past with the older machines – and we can now schedule our production on a ‘make-to-order’ basis, reducing the need for excessive finished goods inventories,” Mr Palmer further explained.
PennPac’s dedication to providing flexible solutions to end users, converters and suppliers remains unwavering. To meet increasing demand for wider width reels and larger rewind diameters, PennPac decided to invest in the larger Atlas CW800 secondary slitter as well and confirmed the order at the end of last year. The new Atlas slitter runs at speeds of up to 1,000m/min (3,300ft/min) with a maximum rewind diameter of 1,000mm (39in).
“The performance of the ER610 has given us so much confidence in Atlas and Titan slitting technology that we had no hesitation in buying the larger Atlas machine from Bobst Group. At PennPac, it’s all about what will meet our customers’ needs – and these machines will help us to do just that,” he concluded.