Illig inaugurates customer center

Though the firm’s Managing Director, Karl Schäuble, hesitates to take a guess as to Illig’s market share, he does note that its 750 employees remain an anomaly in a segment of the industry where most of its competitors have 100 employees or less. The largest manufacturer of thermoforming machinery, Illig (Heilbronn, Germany) took time this week for an open house to which some 250 processors from around the world attended.

During that open house, held yesterday and today at its global headquarters, the manufacturer officially inaugurated its new €7 million customer center, and also shared news about a soon-to-be commercial inmold labeled package. According to Schäuble, the company hosts multi-day training sessions at least a dozen times per year, and even more single-day sessions, and intends to leverage its new customer center to increase this pace, especially in light of developments in thermoforming machinery which predicate increased levels of training among processors’ employees. Thermoforming continues its transition from an art to a science, with an increasing number of sensors integrated into machines to help processors control more variables.

Without naming the company, officials also said that an Austrian processor and Illig customer this year will start processing of round, inmold labeled, thermoformed containers, and they expect other processors to soon follow suit. During the open house Illig displayed the inmold labeling (IML) system used, which it developed and manufactures itself. When asked what took the thermoforming machinery community so long with regard to IML, Claus Weinert, product manager for the company’s RDM-K machines (in-tool forming and trimming), as well as sales manager for Ireland and the UK, counters that his company was actively developing an IML-capable system as early as 1990, but at the time potential customers had no choice of affordable labels. That situation has changed and should help thermoformers re-discover IML, he predicts.

Weinert told MPW that IML of rectangular containers is no more difficult than that for round containers; the technique required is slightly different. Labels used for thermoformed IML containers are the same as those used for injection molding, makeing them easily sourced, and he cites thermoforming’s advantage in that it requires only vacuum to pick up, carry, and insert the labels in the thermoforming tool. Injection molding systems running IML require static electricity to handle labels, adding an element of complexity to the process. —Matt Defosse