Serisco and Valiani: printing and die-cutting give shape to industrial screen printing
Read this article, originally published on Italia Publishers and which we reproduce in its entirety, and find out how Valiani cutting plotters have helped Serisco screen printing to innovate and remain competitive on the market.
With four decades of screen-printing tradition behind it, Serisco is preparing for the business of the future between inkjet printing and digital cutting by Valiani.
Serisco is one of the few surviving serigraphs of the storm that, in the last two decades, has
wiped out many of these extraordinary companies. Starting from generalist operators, too fossilized on graphics and on posters, which only in a minor part have been able to react and
reinvest in significant digital printing technologies.
Yes, digital printing: the real game-changer of this and other printing markets and decoration! But let’s go back to Limena, in the province of Padua, where Serisco first saw the light of day in 1974, being founded by Mario, Luigi and Giampietro Scoizzato, father and uncles of the current owners: Pierluigi and Francesco.
They accompany us on a short journey through their 600 m2 of hyper-specialist technology and applications. « The company was born to serve the local industry, in particular the sportswear and bicycle production sectors, for which we produced very high resistance, durable labels », says Pierluigi. « Then the crisis came, we had to open up and interact with an ever wider range of customers ».
Today Serisco serves countless types of small and large companies, from manufacturing to agri-food, ranging from long-lasting self-adhesive labels up to the front panels on membrane keyboards and front panels for machinery.
membrane fronts and keyboards
« Special » products
Since its foundation, Serisco has pursued the mission of achieving special applications for surface decoration on a wide range of materials.
« We work with technical offices, which send us their particular functional and design needs » explains Scoizzato, « that can range from a particular duration, abrasion, atmospheric and chemical agent resistance. To the point that every single project is a tailored process, in which we do not only play the role of the supplier but also that of a consultant ».
A business model that not only earned Serisco the trust of its customers and but also gained some fame even beyond regional borders. The company, while maintaining a compact size, continues to grow and acquire orders in Italy and from abroad.
Customized materials and shapes: digital has arrived
The industry has not escaped the forces of just-in-time production logistics prevailing in all sectors. On the contrary, it excels at them. For this, Serisco added a design, prototyping and entirely digital production department to its screen printing production unit in 2001.
« We did not abandon screen printing, which remains the only technology capable of satisfying certain functional needs » explains Scoizzato « but we approached digital to make processes more efficient, to introduce customization and reach image quality levels and halftones that were unthinkable in screen printing. »
So Serisco has invested in two eco-solvent inkjet printers, increasingly developing digital print volumes and soon finding itself having to deal with bottlenecks that the immediacy of print-on-demand does not allow.
For this, the Venetian company introduced a new Mat Pro Ultra V flatbed cutting system by Valiani in 2015. « Labels have a shape and have always had it, but the quantitative is more than it used to be » concludes Scoizzato « so if on the one hand die-cutting externally is uneconomical, on the other it prevents us from having complete control of the process, checking the quality and precision of the cut and the half-cut maniacally « .
Valiani digital cutting technology has also allowed Serisco to significantly reduce approval, pre-production times and delivery of the finished work, with distinct operational and economic advantages.
Pierluigi Scoizzato
Co-owner of Serisco
“Today, an industrial product is hardly square, rectangular or round. Nor can it be standardized within predefined forms. ”
INTERVIEW WITH SERISCO CO-OWNER PIERLUIGI SCOIZZATO
What are the challenges today for a company like Serisco?
The main one is to seize the opportunities that the market offers us and turn them into a profitable business: be it from industry, promotional clothing or visual communication. All this while maintaining the very high level of specialization that sets us apart.
What does it mean to be specialists?
UV inkjet printing allowed many operators of graphics to print on different materials, with more or more unsatisfactory results. But it is a very different thing to approach a real industrial decoration application: if a product has to respond to specific durability requirements and endurance, chemical skills and process are the keys. For this, and also for safety reasons, the only UV that we use is the screen printing one. To this, we add our skill that comes from over 40 years of experience between plastics, metal, fabrics and industrial adhesives to the materials.
How important is the cut in your workflow?
Hardly an industrial product today is square, rectangular or round. Nor can it be standardized within predefined forms. For this reason, after years of outsourced die-cutting, we decided to install a digital cutting system, opting for the Mat Pro Ultra V by Valiani.
What are the plusses of Valiani cutting technology?
First of all, the possibility of making different processes simultaneously, or anyway with a
rapid tool change time, but above all by avoiding the costs of making the die and reducing the work start-up times. Another plus is the compact size, perfect for who, like us, work in screen printing and where materials rarely exceed the 70×100. Last but not least, the accessible investment level: a less expensive machine amortizes more quickly and makes us very competitive on selling prices.
What are the most promising areas for the future?
We are exploring multiple segments close to ours, starting from any affinity of materials, formats, printing technology or type of finishing. Also, in this case, is printing and digital cutting to inspire and guide us in our investigative process. Difficult to say which is the right niche, but having such flexible tools is a big plus.
