We rarely give up on difficult products

Manoj Subramaniam, Chief Technology Officer of packaging veteran Vectacraft, provides details of his company and also puts his views on the packaging industry in an exclusive chat with Sachin Jagdale

What are your company's products?

With the wealth of experience and expertise garnered over nearly 25 years in the packaging industry, Vectacraft specialises in innovating cartoners, bundlers and casepackers with speeds starting from 25 cartons/minute (cpm) and going up to 300 cpm which our flagship, the MERLIN 300XC, boasts of. Each of these models integrates smoothly with any upstream primary packing machine in complete synchronisation.

We can deploy both horizontal and vertical cartoners for cartons as narrow as 15 mm and as big as 220 mm wide and handle products as varied as blisters with ampoules to pencils with bearings to light bulbs with MCBs and so much more; individually, collated or in combination with other products or inserts.

Who are your pharma customers in India and abroad?

JB Chemicals, Indoco, IPCA, Cadilla, GSK, Cheryl, Ranbaxy, Alkem to name a few.

What is the use of your products to the pharma companies? Besides pharma companies who are your other customers?

Cartoners are used for any product which is in a carton. The moment you start packing more than 10,000 units of a product in a carton per day, the need for a cartoner is created. Blisters, bottles, ampoules, vials, aerosols, IV fluid containers are all packed by our cartoners with completely automated transfer from upstream primary packing machines. Our bundlers are next in line and they collate and wrap the cartons coming out of the cartoner forming a great-looking multipack. The casepacker then puts these multipacks into shipper boxes. The last machine can be alternatively used to put the cartons directly into the shipper box or even a bare product (collated) into the shipper.

As we offer cartoners and complete end-of-line solutions, our machines go for all products that are in cartons and hence it is not limited to any industry. Customers from other industries include Konica, Havell's, Saudi perfumes, Hindustan Unilever amongst others.

What are the features of your packaging machines?

Offering a complete solution from secondary packaging up to end-of-line is our specialisation and we don't consider a job well-done unless it has been done in totality. Vectacraft's specialisation is in offering a line consisting of a cartoner, bundler and casepacker for a particular product.

While most cartoning machine manufacturers expect their customers' requirements to be suitably met by something from their standard range, Vectacraft does things differently. We exist, simply put, to offer complete, tailor-made automation solutions to link with our customers' upstream primary packing machines, and then follow through to the end-of-line.

Our cartoner receives the product from the upstream machine and then takes it from there until the shipper box comes out of the end-of-line casepacker. Since we believe in complete automation, more often than not there is always a transfer/in-feed system for even a difficult product. Usually these are picked with place systems with the aid of Servo or pneumatics.

We work very closely with the upstream machine producer as we need to offer our customers an integrated line, which we stand guarantee for. In some cases, we even call for the upstream machine to our factory to undertake the integration. This helps us in simulating an actual production sequence and is of course done with complete help from its respective manufacturer.

Most of our high speed cartoners have Servo-driven carton pick-up and product conveyors which aids smooth movement in achieving higher speeds without any problem. The unique feature of our casepackers is the fact that product loading can be done from side, top or bottom, after collation.

And not forgetting the most important fact that we came out with India's first 300 speed cartoner, more than a year back and we still are the fastest!

Could you tell us about the cost effectiveness of your packaging machines?

Our machines are priced almost the same as our few competitors in the Indian market. But we offer a lot more features in our machines which makes running the machine easier, something which the customer accepts. In the global marketplace, of course, our prices are low and our advantage vis-à-vis the European manufacturers will always be there, as our technology speaks for itself.

India is becoming the of hub international pharma industry. How important is this development from the packaging industry point of view?

The pharma industry being one of the bigger industries, the packaging industry (which is a big part of this) definitely gets benefited whereby buyers looking for bulk drugs also look out for the packaging options. As it is, Asia (read mainly India) is already doing really good in packaging machineries and we can only go forward.

How do you handle the ever-changing needs of clients?

In cartoners the key differentiation is the level of automation. At first instance, we always look out for an automatic option for transferring the products into our cartoner. We rarely give up on difficult products and ensure at least a partial automated transfer. This approach is followed in casepackers as well and this is what sets us apart. Hence, customers find it easier to convey their needs to us as we are always 'listening'.

The young, firebrand sales team at Vectacraft is driven by its goal to identify every type of packaging problem that a manufacturer may encounter. Our uncompromising R&D division devotes itself to coming up with ways to decimate these problems. And the finesse of our production personnel, of course, really puts the 'craft' in Vectacraft.

Tell us about your post delivery services.

Locally, we depute technicians and supply spares from our factory. In the international market, we have partnerships in about 25 countries and our partners sell as well as service our machines. In fact, we make it a point to ensure that our partners are qualified enough to sell and back-up our machines, never mind if they are selling a top-of-the-line machine of a European manufacturer. Presently, we supply spares for exports market from India.

At our end, we have trained set of technicians. All of them work for a minimum of two years in the shop floor till they are allowed to venture on site.

What are your future plans?

The opportunities in secondary packaging and end-of-line is huge. Cartoners and casepackers themselves are big segments. And our intention, as always, will be to automate as much as possible. We will be making auto in-feed systems for many more products. Also, we thrive on supplying a line and taking responsibility for the line as opposed to individual machines. Hence, we will be working on automating the intermediate areas also to the extent possible, so that manual intervention is completely eliminated. Our R&D is already working on faster machines and that is something which has always given us a kick.

sachin.jagdale@expressindia.com