by Kristin Reynolds BCI Managing Editor
Converter of the Month, Colbert Packaging
This converter is accustomed to being on the threshold of new opportunities, as it's always focused on its next step forward.
In early February, I drove to Lake Forest, Illinois, to visit Colbert Packaging Corp.'s folding carton headquarters. After gathering miscellaneous reporter paraphernalia from my car-my camera, recorder, briefcase etc.-I approached the front entrance with confidence. I reached for the door with my free hand, which happened to be my left. After exerting an unusual amount of effort, the door opened. But then it became wedged-permanently, I feared-on top of the bone-colored tile over which it hung. I wrestled with it for a few moments, and the door won.
As I stood there and stared at it, a gentleman behind me who witnessed my struggle was kind enough to explain to me that I was attempting to open the wrong door, that the one I was forcing was supposed to remain locked. I should have been trying the door on the right, he said, the one that, since I'm right-handed, I usually try first.
It's ironic in a way, that my visit should start out on that particular note, because, unlike myself, Colbert Packaging, at least thus far, has chosen many of the right doors to open for further success. In business since 1959, formerly known as Kroeck Paper Box, the company has changed locations and grown cumulatively ever since, with one rigid set-up box facility in Indiana, and two folding carton operrations in Illinois.
Jim Hamilton, executive vice president, joined Colbert in 1976. His father started with Colbert in 1959 with founder, Bud Colbert. Today, Hamilton and the company's president, Ed Baker, are at the helm, having together led the Colbert team through two years of back-to-back sales growth of 20% and 30% per year.
Colbert's existing 100,000-sq.-ft. carton facility is equipped with a 50-in. six-color KBA Planeta, one 40-in. six-color Heidelberg Speedmaster and a 40-in. Mitsubishi. It has four diecutters (two Bobst and two Sugano) and six folder-gluers (four Bobst and two Post), among myriad other pieces of capital equipment. And soon, Colbert will be home to a Creo computer-to-plate system (see sidebar).
Though historically an offset house, the company opened a 20,000-sq.-ft. flexo facility, Colbert Flexographic Packaging (CFP), in January of 1999. "It's the first of its kind in the Midwest," according to Hamilton, "at least of the kind that we set up with the latest in web technology." (CFP is equipped with two new 20-in. Mark Andy 4150 board presses.)
As evidenced by its early entree into flexo on cartons, keeping tabs on what's ahead for the industry seems to be what Colbert does best. "The way we operate is that we read trend lines and keep a close watch on the pulse of our customers' expectations," Hamilton said. "We know and sense what's going on, and see things that we want. My style is to charge ahead and take no prisoners, " a natural approach, since Hamilton recently retired as a brigadier general in the Illinois Air Guard. He acknowledged that he relies upon the capabilities of his staff to help him in that charge. For example, "We need people like Don Siciliano, our director of imaging, to tell us that CTP is the direction in which we should go, and-thanks to him-we thought, let's do it...let's go CTP. Now, we've even had some customers ask us about it, and I love telling them that we've already committed to it".
Tackling Tomorrow, Today
How has Colbert sustained its growth and, therefore, its ability to afford such extensive investment? "Our growth in recent years has come from new business and existing customers to which we were once just a secondary supplier then became a primary one. I know, however, that to continue with double-digit growth, additional new goals must be met." Hamilton is very aware of the need for fresh business. That's where broadcasting its new and ever-changing capabilities comes into play.
If the company's prediction that flexo in cartons will double in five years' time comes true, its shiny flexo operation will likely contribute greatly to Colbert's future growth in sales, However, the company plans to expand in numerous areas, not just flexo. According to Hamilton, Colbert is on the verge of acquiring a new building to house its set-up facility in Indiana, followed by incorporating a contract packaging unit into that same operation. Acquisitions of other companies are a strong possibility for the future, as is other companies are a strong possibility for the future, as is expansion to other parts of the country.
Hamilton also thinks that Colbert's consistency and longevity has contributed to its success. "With industry consolidation that has taken place recently, the bigger companies have changed their calling cards. Colbert is still here." Sometimes, he continued, the reorganized companies take a year to establish their direction, while in the meantime, Colbert has gained a competitive edge.
"We've survived for 40 years, we're financially stable and we've been able to invest $7 million into or business in the last two years," said Hamilton. "We've withstood a lot of tests in an industry that has seen many changes. And our customer base reads like a list of who's who. I don't want to say that we're like an Internet stock in terms of appreciation, but we're a company that seems to be doing the right thing just about every day.
"But we can't take what we have for granted," he continued. "I know that what I did yesterday is not good enough for tomorrow. And that's why I have to continually motivate the people with whom I work to the point where they keep trying for a higher level of accomplishment."
Developing A 'Feel" For Flexo
Before leaving for a luncheon with one of his biggest customers, Hamilton passed me along for further interviewing with Lon Johnson, officially Colbert's vice president of new product development and its unofficial flexo guru. "If you want to talk with someone who knows absolutely everything about flexography, and who's excited about it, Lon's your man," he said. Well, I did, and he was.
Although his title makes him sound more like a packaging engineer, Johnson-who is the Chicago chapter president of the Institute of Packaging Professionals- has been in packaging sales for 20 years. "I got the title because when I came to Colbert," he explained, "I helped put the flexo division together, and our new product was flexo." Johnson is integral to educating the Colbert team and its customers on the differences and intricacies of both flexo and offset technologies.
"Flexo versus offset is an education process that we carry out with the help of our sales staff," said Johnson. He emphasized that the key has been to develop his offset-oriented sales staff's "feel" for flexo. " They're getting a good understanding of it. We've had a lot of internal seminars and have walked each one of them through each press. I've also made product sheets to show them what's good, what sells and what works."
Though the flexo and offset operations share the same management and sales staff, that's all they share. "Flexo and offset are two completely separate entities," said Johnson. "I've seen companies try to put a flexo press in the middle of an offset building and it's been a dismal failure because the two processes are so different."
However, according to Johnson, the process outcomes are growing increasingly similar. In most cases, he said, the average person wouldn't be able to tell whether one of Colbert's cartons was printed using flexo or offset. "Even with a loupe, it's hard," Johnson said. "If you really dug into it, you could probably find something. But you'd really have to be good."
Choosing Between Flexo and Offset
Once properly trained, making the choice between running a job flexo or offset eventually becomes self-evident, according to Johnson. "It boils down to each process' advantages," he explained. "Flexo is more of a quick-change, label mentality. When they made roll label equipment, they built the equipment around that same mentality. So when you have short-run jobs with multiple copies, you run them flexo." Flexo also offers superior color control, according to Johnson. "It's called 'flexo by the numbers.' he said, "you don't need a light and a dark-once we've determined the parameters, we don't expect them to ever change."
With offset, Johnson continued, if you have an extremely tight-register, four-color process job, it stays offset. "If you're running glamour boxes for the perfume industry, it's natural to stick with offset. Think of it practically; use a little common sense. And when you understand both processes, it becomes pretty clear."
Johnson is pleased with the flexo facility, and he has high hopes for growth. However, according to Johnson, Colbert will never expand its existing Lake Forest facility. "We're looking for customers who want to partner with us and want us to put one of these operations in their backyard. We've blueprinted this facility, and we want a customer who wants us right next door to them. In 10 years, I hope to have three or four more."
Right now, Johnson is confident of Colbert's competitive advantages and, with the addition of CTP on the horizon, the door to the future looks wide open. "We are well-armed," he said. " We have some serious firepower here. We have 50-in., 40-in., 29in. and 20-in. equipment. We have flexo, offset, eight colors, six colors and UV and conventional coatings. We have so many combinations here, our challenge isn't whether we can we run the job, it's putting the product where it belongs. So I tell our sales staff, 'You have this competitive edge that is so much beyond even the larger companies-use it."'
As Johnson walked me out of Colbert's offices, I again reached out to open the door with my free hand, this time my right. "No," he warned. "Always go for the lock...you need to always go for the lock," as he pointed to the door with the lock, which-sort of ironically, I thought-opened wide as I pushed. Pleased that I had avoided ramming the door into the floor another time with yet another audience, I smiled to myself, then to Lon, and then moved on, allowing the irony of Colbert's having any doors that remain locked, sink in. "Open the locked door, " I thought to myself as I got into my car and drove away.
Comfortable with Computer-to-Plate
Colbert is currently installing computer-to-plate (CTP). In the interview segment below, Don Siciliano, the company's director of imaging, discloses the reasons why.
Why are you making the move to CTP? There is a spectrum of reasons. One is marketing. Some customers are taking leadership and saying, "Either you have CTP, or we're not going to do business with you." Technically, if you look at the process, the most important thing that we have in pre-press is film, proofs and plating time. And one of the drivers behind CTP is to eliminate film to save that expense. A more important reason for going CTP is process control. And that means once you construct an image, which is typically assembled in a digital format, you can take that data, go right to a plate and not have any type of corruption or distortion in the information. That goes for copy and for color. Once you have that, you have a comfort level that the data that you're putting in is the data that your getting out. We believe we'll provide better service to our customers, and we're raising the quality that we're outputting.
How long do you think it will be until Colbert sees a return on its almost $1 million investment? I think that we could see a return on our investment as quickly as two years. We have no present digital services. So we're going to have a much faster return on investment because we're going to go from nothing to everything.
Which system have you chosen and why do you expect it to be a good fit for Colbert? We've coupled it with PCC Artwork Systems software on the front end. We've found that the Creo system will provide us with the most process control and it has guaranteed repeatability, which appeals to us as well as our customers. PCC gives us the widest range of workflows; a faster workflow that will give us security and a vector workflow that will give us flexibility and a smaller file size. It also has the ability to do stepping and repeating as well as soft and remote proofing. The Creo device only exposes litho plates, but we're ultimately going to employ the same technology to expose flexo plates. We're also buying a Heidelberg Hercules imagesetter to imagefilm that we'll use to expose plates in conventional flexo platemaking.
What doors will this open for Colbert? I think it will be huge. People will be attracted to CTP. What will also be appealing, is that not only will we do CTP and high-end graphics editing, we're also going to have a sophisticated file transfer service, and we'll be very strong in color management, an areain which Colbert wants to take leadership. It will raise the bar in terms of our quality.
(Reprinted from the March 2000 issue, Boxboard Containers International. All Rights Reserved.)