Watershed Group Achieves Label Color Consistency and Efficiency Gains with Flint Group’s VIVO Colour Solutions Ink Recipe Software
October 28, 2020The Watershed Group, the Irish-owned, international label converting
group, has tightened colour accuracy and improved operating efficiencies at its
Dublin plant, after automating its spot-colour matching processes with Flint
Group’s VIVO Colour Solutions software. The new software enables Watershed to
reproduce special brand colours in UV-flexo with repeatable precision, while
achieving significant materials savings and productivity gains.
VIVO Colour Solutions is an intelligent database of colours and mixing recipes
for any combination of ink set, printing method and anilox roll setting.
Available instantly and securely via the Cloud, each recipe matches colour
targets with the colour printed on the press, using digital data that can be
L*a*b* values, CxF files, PANTONE® Colour references or samples scanned with a
spectrophotometer.
Liz Waters, CEO, Watershed Group, comments: “Flint Group’s VIVO Colour
Solutions makes colour matching measurable, predictable and fast, enabling us
to meet the brand owners’ exacting demands of colour fidelity at the first
attempt – every time. The elimination of manual mixing and streamlining of
processes thanks to VIVO means we save 5,000 linear metres of paper and
increase press uptime by up to 18 hours per month.”
With factories in Ireland, the UK, Poland and Germany, Watershed supplies
labels to international brands including Nestlé, Reckitt Benckiser, Tesco, Lidl
and Asda Walmart. It has a strong presence in the spirits, luxury beverages,
food, pharmaceuticals and chemicals sectors.
For all clients, consistent, accurate presentation of colour schemes and logos
is vital for strong brand recognition and retail sales success. However, before
the software’s installation, colour matching at Watershed involved
time-consuming ‘trial-and-error’ mixing, relying on eyesight to judge accuracy.
Adoption of VIVO complements Watershed’s HD-flexo workflow, which includes a
combined total of 11 Mark Andy PS Performance series presses at its five
locations. To customise recipes specially for Watershed, Flint audited the
aniloxes used on the Mark Andy presses at the Dublin site. Cell-count
characteristics were factored into calculations to provide a database of
recipes for each label job, uniquely accessible to the company via a secure
portal.