How increasing your label rolls only slightly, can HALF your downtime!
That’s a very bold claim, I hear you say! It’s not magic or any special trickery, just maths….
Here’s a little known fact: The larger the roll of labels becomes, the number of labels you get per roll increases significantly. I don’t just mean proportionally, ie 50% bigger rolls don’t give 50% more labels NO, it’s better than that. Much better.
Now, consider how many times your operators change the label rolls on your labellers or print & apply machines per day and work out the time to change them – not just the threading up time but the time to walk to stores, pick up another roll and have a chat about last night’s TV… then you start to get the picture!
Bigger IS better!
Let’s take an example…
An offline benchtop printer and a print & apply labeller.
Typically, unless you have a portable printer, an industrial benchtop label printer will take a roll measuring 200mm diameter and a print & apply labeller will take 300mm.
A fairly standard label size for an outer box label is 100mm wide by 75mm long, plus a 3mm gap. On a 200mm diameter roll, you will get 2,550 labels per roll, whereas on the 300mm diameter, it goes up to a considerable 6,600 per roll.
So a 50% increase in size, has given us 61% more labels on a roll.
Let’s look at some more examples:
| Label Length | 200mm (8-inch) dia. | 300mm (12-inch) dia. | 400mm (16-inch) dia. |
| 50mm | 3,750 | 9,750 | 17,900 |
| 75mm | 2,550 | 6,600 | 12,150 |
| 100mm | 1,900 | 5,000 | 9,200 |
| 150mm | 1,250 | 3,350 | 6,200 |
As you can see, the increase in labels from 300mm to 400mm diameter is massive for such a relatively small increase! Upgrading from 300mm to 400mm is only a 33.3% increase but the number of labels increases by 46%.
So just by using 400mm rolls in production, nearly HALVES the number of roll changes!!!
Therefore if you have a high-volume labelling requirement, it is well worth considering looking at label applicators and print & apply labellers that have the option to take the slightly larger roll capacity, to minimise the amount of downtime incurred, due to less frequent change-overs!
Machines in the ALS product range that can take larger 400mm diameter rolls are:
Labellers: ALS 306, ALS 309, ALS FastPaQ
Print & Apply: ALX 734, ALX 735 and ALX 736
And for those of you stuck with your benchtop printers, fear not, we also sell 300mm and 400mm diameter powered jumbo roll unwinders!!!