Your press operator finishes a job and heads off to clean the anilox rolls. Hours later, they’re still scrubbing away while your printing press sits silent. Sound familiar?
This scenario plays out in print factories worldwide. And it’s costing more than most realise.
Modern automated cleaning systems can do it in minutes what takes your team hours to accomplish manually. But this isn’t just about convenience, it’s about basically changing your operation’s economics.
Think about it this way: every hour your press isn’t running is money walking out the door. When you can reclaim hours per day from cleaning tasks, those hours go straight back to productive work.
Picture a typical packaging printer running two shifts. Between UV inks, water-based coatings, and solvent-based liquids, they’re constantly switching between different jobs throughout the day.
Currently, each cleaning cycle means calling an operator away from the press, gathering cleaning supplies, and spending significant time manually scrubbing anilox rolls. By the time everything is properly cleaned, dried, and ready for the next job, valuable production time has slipped away.
With automated cleaning, that same operator simply loads the anilox into the cleaning system, presses start and returns to other press preparation tasks. Fifteen minutes later, the anilox emerges perfectly clean and ready for immediate use.
The difference isn’t just the time saved on cleaning itself. Job changeovers become faster and more predictable, the press runs more consistently, and deadlines become easier to meet.
Over time, this operational efficiency creates capacity for additional work without adding shifts or equipment. Often printers discover they can handle 20-30% more jobs with the same resources, simply by eliminating cleaning bottlenecks.
The benefits extend far beyond the obvious time recovery. When aniloxes are cleaned consistently and thoroughly, your print quality becomes more predictable. Setup times decrease because you’re starting each job with clean equipment. Waste drops because you’re not dealing with contamination from previous jobs. The entire workflow thereby becomes smoother and more efficient.
Consider this: if you could buy back hours of production time every day for the cost of a cleaning system, would you do it? Most printers find that the math works out to a payback period of less than a year.
The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in automated cleaning - it’s whether you can afford not to.
Take a week to track how much time your team actually spends on cleaning tasks. Then multiply that by what an hour of press time is worth to your business. The result will likely make the investment decision much clearer.
We can help you calculate exactly how much time, waste, and cost you could save and what that means for your ROI.
With just a few inputs, like the number of jobs you run per day, your cleaning routine, and hourly press costs, we’ll provide a clear picture of your potential return on investment with Flexo Wash solutions.