Plastag Facility

Plastag's move to an 85,000 square foot, state-of-the-art building is in response to the continuous sales growth and loyalty from our customers. Plastag has increased production capacity 100% since 2003, resulting in shorter lead times and more space to inventory materials. Whether your order is large or small, Plastag can have your printed order ready in 14 to 20 business days, depending on the job. We will fill your blank card order immediately or no later than 5 business days. Trust Plastag to have your next order to you on time!

Technology

Our prepress department has the latest FUJI direct-to-plate laser printing plate setter and FUJI “Final Proof” proofing system.

Our printing room has two high-capacity full-color 40” lithograph printing presses, including one five color press with UV and one four color press with UV. The five color and four color Komori presses allow us to print complex jobs in a single pass to generate the highest degree of quality.

Plastag's Silk Screen printing department has four screen presses including two Sakauri cylinder presses with UV and X-Y registration for accuracy.

Our lamination systems include two 12-daylight and one 6-daylight presses, with a combined capacity of 72,000 cards per hour. With our additional hydraulic laminators, we can laminate 2 million cards per day. These lamination presses provide uniform application pressure which prevents discoloration. Our Burkle presses are fully mechanized with automatic load/unloading of products and automatic transport from each individual lay-up station.

Exceptional accuracy is required for cards using the entire area for graphics. Our Oasys and Spartanics custom die cutters are designed to feed and align the sheets in the lamination format and shear the sheets in two parts. Then punching and stacking cards in three interchangeable magazines. Punching speeds vary between 11,000 cards/hour and 24,000 cards/hour depending on the sheet dimensions.

Quality Control vs. Quality Assurance

Quality Control: Visual inspection

Plastag can individually inspect every card we print if a machine-inspected surface is required for your application. The inspection process scans cards for scratches, marks, printing accuracy, color, and other surface characteristics. Our inspection cameras can detect a scratch or single grain of dirt as small as 6 microns.

Quality Assurance: Card sampling and SPC methods

Improvement: In 2003, the PPM (parts per million defective) rate averaged 80,000 (2.75 Sigma). In 2006, we have achieved a PPM of 22,000 (3.5 Sigma), or 2.2% for all defects via quality methods. We’re striving for 4 Sigma (6,210 PPM)!

We also perform in-process product sampling at each work station and specific sampling plans are used post-production to validate our manufacturing methods.

Digital Pre-press

Plastag has a complete electronic pre-press department to better meet our customer needs and to increase our efficiency for proof approval.

Presently we support the latest versions of the following applications:

• Adobe Acrobat (PDF files)
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Photoshop
• CorelDRAW
• Freehand
• QuarkXPress
  

Customers can send artwork on Zip cartridge, CD, or DVD, or via email or our FTP site.

Our Associates

The relationships we have built with our customers are the foundation and building blocks of Plastag. We make it a priority to work together with our customers so we understand how Plastag cards fit into a successful card program.

We have these great relationships with our customers because we recruit and retain the best character in our Associates.