“We had 200 SKUs and no room for downtime,” says Anna Fischer, Production Manager at NordTrak, a mid-sized European tools supplier. Their product mix ranges from spare parts packaged for e-commerce to heavy kits bound for fleet depots. The packaging line had to flex—daily—between multiple dielines and box sizes.
They asked a simple question: “how to get custom boxes made” without turning the shop schedule into chaos. The path they chose combined an in-house Digital Printing workflow for short runs with external sourcing of packola boxes for ultra-rapid turns and pilot launches. It wasn’t a silver bullet. But it gave them room to breathe.
Before the change, crews were swapping plates nearly every hour. Off-press changeovers ran at 40–60 minutes. OEE hovered around 65–70%, and waste on complex cartons sat at roughly 6–8%. For a line handling both custom paper boxes and rugged packaging for custom tool boxes for flatbed trucks, those numbers added up fast.
Changeover and Setup Time
NordTrak’s core bottleneck was changeover. Offset Printing handled legacy volumes well, but every dieline swap meant plates, ink keys, and a round of make-ready on the Folding Carton line. With 200 SKUs cycling in and out—some seasonal, some on-demand—the press room lived in a near-permanent setup state. On a busy day, changeovers landed at 40–60 minutes per job and were closely tied to color drift between coated paperboard and light corrugated, especially when moving from retail boxes to packaging for custom tool boxes for flatbed trucks.
Color consistency compounded the issue. When substrates changed, the team saw ΔE creeping beyond targets, pushing rework. Under Fogra PSD guidelines, they aimed for controlled tolerances, yet the mix of substrates and finishes (Varnishing, Die-Cutting, Gluing) made repeatability tough. Waste ran ~6–8%, and first-pass yield plateaued around the mid-80s.
Here’s where it gets interesting: the SKU mix wasn’t evenly distributed. Roughly 60–70% of the line fell into short-run or seasonal batches. That pushed the team to rethink the split—keep Offset for true long runs, and pilot a short-run lane using Digital Printing for custom paper boxes to remove lengthy plate changes and tighten setup windows.
Solution Design and Configuration
The team configured a short-run Digital Printing lane with UV-LED Ink on Folding Carton for most retail/e-commerce items, while reserving Corrugated Board for shipper packaging. For select retail lines that sit near consumer goods, Low-Migration Ink was specified to align with EU expectations. Finishing stayed consistent—Die-Cutting for structure, Gluing for speed, Spot UV only when the marketing team justified the extra touch. For ultra-fast pilots and micro-batches, NordTrak sourced packola boxes through an online configurator and dieline library that matched their existing CAD standards.
Let me back up for a moment: the internal question was literally written on a whiteboard—”how to get custom boxes made” without blowing up lead times. The trial plan was simple: 500-unit pilots via packola to validate new dielines and color sequences, then shift successful SKUs to the in-house Digital Printing lane. A packola coupon code from a vendor newsletter cut the pilot’s landed cost enough to get purchasing on board. On the plant side, operators trained for fast calibration, GS1 barcodes and DataMatrix check scanning, and a tighter color control routine aimed at ΔE in the 2–3 range.
But there’s a catch: digital isn’t a cure-all. Per-unit cost rises on very long runs. NordTrak drew a line—jobs above ~10k packs stayed with Offset Printing; jobs below that moved to digital or remained as packola boxes for short cycles. The hybrid model kept changeovers in check while avoiding a cost spike on big promotional pushes.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Fast forward six months. Changeover windows on short-run boxes settled around 15–20 minutes because plates were out of the equation. Color accuracy tightened, with average ΔE holding ~2–3 across the common Folding Carton substrates. FPY rose from roughly 85% to the 92–94% band on the digital lane. Throughput for mixed SKUs climbed from ~7–8k packs/day to ~9–10k packs/day on weeks heavy with custom paper boxes and small-batch promos.
Waste on complex dielines moved from the 6–8% range down closer to ~3–4% once the new color routine and QC gates were in place. On the sustainability side, CO₂/pack fell by ~10–12% thanks to reduced scrap and tighter make-ready. Cost per SKU for pilots and seasonal work came down in the ~6–9% range versus the old offset-first approach, with FSC material retained where specified. It’s fair to say the hybrid model delivered operational breathing room without pushing compliance off the table.
It wasn’t flawless. Corrugated showed slight mis-registration early on, bumping scrap by ~2–3% for a few weeks until the team tuned the die-cut windows. The turning point came when operators standardized a calibration “recipe” per substrate. Today, the plant keeps a steady cadence: in-house Digital Printing for short-run agility, offset for big pushes, and packola for pilots and sprint launches. If you’re staring at the same whiteboard question—”how to get custom boxes made”—this is a workable path. And yes, they still lean on packola when a new SKU pops up on Friday and needs boxes on Monday.
