Cost Benefits For Healthcare And Pharma Custom Label Printing
Kelly Ng, of Epson America Healthcare, joins Todd and Todd at Pharma EXPO 2014 to speak about the innovations in printing and the cost benefits for small to medium custom printing jobs. Ng also discusses the critical role that printing technology plays a role in serialization.
Interview Transcript:
Todd: OK, good Afternoon Todd and Todd live from Chicago Life Science Connect Radio's day three coverage in this great event. Todd, we've been broadcasting from this show long enough that we are starting to get some friends. Our next guest is one of those guys that you and I always enjoy hanging with. We always learn something from him, more importantly.
Todd: I will officially extend the invitation to be a friend of the show to Kelly right now.
Kelly: Thank you very much.
Todd: I hope he doesn't turn us down.
Todd: Be careful. Be real careful. Alright, say hello to our guest and friend. His name is Kelly Ng. Product Manager, Epson Healthcare with Epson America Healthcare. Kelly, welcome to the show.
Kelly: Thank you very much. It's good to have a little fun with you guys.
Todd: We try.
Todd: The feeling is mutual. Good to see you. Remind the audience a bit about you and your background.
Kelly: Me personally, I've been in the printing business for quite some time. I've worked on the Ink Jet side with Hewlitt Packard some years ago. I ran a printing operation, a labeling operation for a winery.
Todd: I'd like that job.
Kelly: That was kind of interesting. You have to create some rejects now and then. What do you think they do with the rejects?
Todd: You have to reject the whole bottle right?
Kelly: If it's inexpensive wine, we can kind of dispose of it easily.
Todd: Agreed.
Todd: Give us the ten thousand foot view of Epson America Healthcare. What do you do and how are you serving the market.
Kelly: What we're doing, you can hear about in the pharmaceutical space. We also have another presence on the other side for the chemical space. What we've evolved is a technology that is very durable and lets you print anything you need on demand. Come on by to our booth if you have a chance. We can take fingernail polish remover and wipe it over the label and there would be no impact.
We've been able to certify that for the industry. That has been getting a lot of attraction by the industry for chemical standards and the Life Science people. We marry that durability with the option to print one, if you want, or print a thousand. We now have a span of products that will take you from one to a thousand, one to ten thousand, without difficulty. That is where we're having fun. Now we can dig into more corners of the industry.
Todd: That is exactly what I was going to ask you about. Fascinating technology. I want to ask you a little bit more about that, but talk about the different corners of the industry that you are infiltrating.
Kelly: We have been selling into the pharmaceutical dispensing industry. Compounders, hospitals, hospital pharmacies. What they've done is they've adopted our technology. You can print one. If you think of the pharmacy label, it's the ultimate one custom label. One prescription, one drug, one day, one dosage. That's as custom and on demand as you can get.
We're doing work there already. A lot of pharmaceutical preparation or compounding departments inside of hospitals will make up batches of twenty five to fifty IV bags or whatever, and freeze and store them. That is when they use us. How do you make twenty five labels? That's one side.
The other side is that we have been reaching into the chemical space. We're spreading the definition loosely within our organization. If it hurts you, it's a hazardous substance. If it's supposed to help you, it's a pharmaceutical.
That's our side. Then there is a lot of stuff in between. Food, fragrances. Think of a fragrance. It's flammable. Think of all the compounds going into the drugs that you are making.
It's either flammable or caustic in high concentrations. Those manufacturers are using our technology to label their drums, pails, or quart bottles. In the pharmaceutical repackaging side, a lot of manufacturers want to ship fifty thousand to a million pills and let somebody else worry about getting them to the individual.
So you have distributors that break down the package from fifty thousand to twenty five count bottles. You have to put a label on those bottles. So fifty thousand at fifty count bottles translates to a thousand labels. Try and source that. It's difficult.
Todd: Right.
Kelly: We've been getting connections with people, because if you preprint those, the preprints will cost you two to three times what it would cost for a high volume manufacturer. We can do it for about the same price as a high volume manufacturer. We are saving money for the small to medium repackers. That is really what we are emphasizing here. We have new products that are more attractive for those folks.
Todd: Kelly, we have to tell you that Todd and I have had our minds blown by the seriousness of the counterfeit drug problem that is out there and what the industry is trying to do. Serialization is obviously a very huge issue. What role is Epson Healthcare playing in trying to address that issue?
Kelly: Since we've been able to do custom prints, every print is unique. Serialization is just an extension of that. We have the capability within our printers as so many others do. You can send the proper image and just change the serial number. You can generate four thousand labels each with a unique serial number and barcode.
We're a printer and we can do that now. We can help, but we can do it a little better because you can put color logos on them. That is where we are getting alignment with a lot of folks.
A small distributor will serve a lot of companies that want their logo on it. The health clinic, the beauty clinic, an oncologist. They want their logo on the label. How many will they buy in any order? Twenty five, fifty, maybe a hundred. How do you cover that? We can generate those as you need them. So that's the advantage that we can offer.
Todd: Understood.
Todd: We've been talking a lot about the very small volume user and producer, but what about the flip side of it? What about the guy that needs a million labels?
Kelly: There are a lot of competent people out there serving those people.
Todd: So it's really the specialized unique market that you're serving. Any other thing? We talked about serialization. We talked about adding the color logos, the nail polish remover. What other kinds of characteristics or features are folks asking for?
Kelly: Well if you look at the pharmaceutical dispensing industry, it's rippling through the repacking industry. Government agencies are mandating specific formats. It has to be ten point, twelve point. That impacted New York. All their prescriptions had to be twelve point readable type. California did it for ten point.
You can see the handwriting on the wall. The ingredients labels will start having these specific formats. Have you seen the food format that is being promoted right now? On the back of most food packages you have the declaration of protein and the calorie count and all of that.
Todd: Right.
Kelly: Well there's a move afoot to have that in a large font so it's easier for consumers to see.
Todd: Every year that goes by, I will appreciate that a little more.
Kelly: Every time I buy new glasses, right?
Kelly: So that's already happening and I'm not sure it's codified yet but it is being proposed for the food industry. When it comes to the food, the FDA will have to roll it out to the rest of the world.
Todd: You wouldn't think that printing could still continue to be more and more innovative. It strikes me Kelly, when I listen to you talk about what you're doing and what Epson's doing, that you are very innovative. Working with an organization as reputable as Epson obviously you have the reputation or there's an expectation that you're supposed to be innovative.
How do you guys do it? How do you continue to foster an internal environment where your people and your team are empowered to continue to be and think innovatively?
Kelly: Well, it's part management whipping you to go do those things.
Todd: They asked us, by the way, to continue that while you're here in the booth.
Kelly: How do you grow? You can grow one of two ways. You can grow by saving better than the next guy, or you can grow by finding new business. We have grown in some of our traditional lines. I don't know if you know this but we're the leading Dot Matrix manufacturer in the world.
Todd: You have been for quite some time.
Kelly: Yes, we have been, because we have done it better for a lower cost than the competition. We've out produced them. Dot Marix is declining so what do you do to replace that business? You have to grow new business and that's where we are. We got started in this with coupons. I think I've told that story.
Todd: I think I recall that.
Kelly: When you go to a grocery store and you get a color coupon, that is printed on our technology. That had to be waterproof instantly. Can you imagine putting a coupon in a white shirt? It has to be waterproof. So that started us down the high durability track, unique printing, fast printing and labels. All of that aligned and is serving us very well.
Todd: What next? Let's look into the future a little bit. What's on the horizon? Folks have been talking about eliminating printing for as long as I can remember. It's not going to happen. You know it and I know it. What kind of technologies do you see coming at us in the next few years.
Kelly: Do you remember paperless from thirty years ago?
Todd: Yes I do.
Kelly: You're too young Todd.
Todd: I wasn't alive then.
Kelly: Right now you are seeing great advances to marking on glass and so forth. That's what the other guys do. At the limit, a paper label is still the most efficient way to identify something. Especially in the smaller volumes. So right now we're focused on serving those people that have high variability in either their order size, their business or regulations.
We're doing that and we're stepping up in capability. What you saw last year, or actually earlier this year, we could print about eighteen hundred typical pill bottle sized labels, per hour. We have a machine now that we are launching that can do four thousand per hour.
Todd: Wow.
Todd: Doubled in less than a year?
Kelly: Doubled in less than a year.
Todd: You've been working on that for a while.
Kelly: Over on the other side of packing Expo, we're also showing our commercial press capability from our sister division. They can print at fifteen meters per minute and serve the converters. We serve up to about ten thousand labels per batch.
They can serve up to twenty five to thirty five, forty thousand labels per batch, economically. You're seeing us as a company do more and more for the industrial space.
Todd: Outstanding. Kelly, it breaks our hearts but we are running low on time. Before we let you go, how can people get in touch with you and learn more about what you're doing at Epson America Healthcare?
Kelly: Well, we have a URL that tells you about our whole program. It's called www.epson.com/colorworks.
Todd: Colorworks?
Kelly: Colorworks in one word. That is our trademark logo for our effort. We also have a contact page which I'm embarrassed I don't have. We will get it to you.
Todd: Fair enough. Kelly Ng, product manager with Epson America Healthcare. Kelly, as always, our friend. Good to see you, thanks for stopping by and joining us.
Kelly: Thank you Todd and Todd.
Todd: Good to hear from you again man.
Kelly: Great pleasure.
Todd: Alright, Kelly Ng, project manager, Epson America Healthcare. That wraps this segment. This has been Life Science Connect Radio. Todd and Todd signing off from Chicago. Our live coverage, will be right back.