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Co-Engineering Story

Sub-10-Micron Imprinting for Pharma Carton Lines

A leading European pharma packager needed serialised carton imprinting at line speeds that nobody in the market could deliver. We co-engineered a substrate transport with sub-10-micron precision at 150 m/min — and shipped it on time.

Sub-10-Micron Imprinting for Pharma Carton Lines

Customer

Confidential — Top-3 European Pharma Packager

Industry

Pharma & Healthcare Packaging

Project

2025

CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Pharma serialisation regulations (EU FMD, US DSCSA) require unique 2D codes on every carton. Existing inkjet print stations on the customer's flexo lines could not maintain registration accuracy at production speed — print jitter degraded code readability below the 95% scan rate threshold their pharma clients demanded.

The technical brief was uncompromising: sub-10-micron print registration in both intrack and crosstrack directions, at 150 m/min line speed, on aluminium-laminated carton substrates. No retrofit option from the OEM existed. Procurement had three vendors decline the spec as "not buildable in the timeframe".

APPROACH

Our Approach

We started where every co-engineering project starts at Matti — with a measurement campaign, not a CAD model. Two engineers spent a week on the customer's shop floor instrumenting an existing line with our high-frame-rate registration cameras. The data showed the real culprit was not the print head but a 12-micron oscillation in the substrate transport caused by tension control hunting at the unwind.

From there: a precision web transport with closed-loop tension control sampling at 4 kHz, a custom encoder package on the print zone, and a real-time servo drive that anticipates substrate stretch from upstream load cells. The print station itself stays standard — Matti's contribution sits before and after the heads. We integrated everything into the customer's existing PLC architecture.

RESULT

The Result

Eleven months from kickoff to shipped unit. First production batch hit a 99.2 % code-readability rate, well above the 95 % bar. Line speed: 150 m/min sustained, peaks at 165. Substrate registration: 7-micron 95th-percentile in intrack, 6-micron crosstrack — comfortably inside the 10-micron envelope.

The customer ordered three more units within twelve months. The platform now ships as a Matti-standard option for pharma serialisation lines — every project we land in this segment builds on the same precision transport architecture we developed for this kickoff customer.

„Three vendors said it could not be built. Matti showed up with cameras instead of a brochure, found the real problem in 48 hours, and shipped a working machine in less than a year. That is co-engineering."

Head of Production Engineering · European pharma packager (NDA)

Technologies used

Precision web transport (4 kHz closed-loop tension control) Custom encoder package, sub-10-micron resolution Real-time servo drive with substrate-stretch anticipation High-frame-rate registration cameras for commissioning Integration with customer-side Siemens S7 PLC

The shop-floor instrumentation phase turned out to be the project's single most important investment. Without it, we would have built a faster print station that still missed the registration target — because the real problem lived upstream in the unwind tension loop, not in the print zone.

This is why every Matti co-engineering project starts the same way: we measure first, design second. Customers occasionally push back ("we already know what's wrong"), but the data has surprised us — and them — often enough that we hold the line.

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