Prairie State Labels Sees Quick ROI From Brookfield AST-100

Brookfield AST-100CHICAGO, ILBrookfield Engineering Laboratories Inc., a world leader in viscosity measurement and control for more than 80 years, has provided a multi station viscosity control solution to Prairie State Group, a custom printer and laminator of flexible packaging and pressure sensitive labels near Chicago, IL.

Prairie State is a completely self contained operation that includes state of the art design capabilities, prepress functions, digital platemaking, laminating and printing. Its equipment gives it the luxury of handling all aspects of customer jobs in house and ensuring that its work is of the highest quality, cost competitive and delivered on time without having to rely on outside sources. Its mission is to offer the highest level of customer satisfaction by efficiently providing industry leading quality, innovation and cost effective packaging solutions to their clients.

For this reason, the company has chosen Brookfield Engineering in cooperation with Sun Chemical as strategic partners and has installed Brookfield’s AST-100 MultiPlo Viscosity Control System. As the world’s largest producer of printing inks and pigments, Sun Chemical worked with Brookfield to supply a multi station ink viscosity control system to allow higher efficiency when running their inks on Prairie States’ PCMC Evolution and Revolution presses. PCMC (Paper Converting Machine Company), a press manufacturer with more than 85 years of experience in machine design, manufacturing and service, regularly uses the Brookfield AST-100 for viscosity control on its presses. The collaborative products provided by these companies have given PSG a great running operation.

Because these presses were not originally supplied with viscosity controls, Brookfield’s experienced sales and service team was able to customize a system that integrated seamlessly. “Other than Brookfield’s superior products, we also demanded a strategic partner who could help us find a custom solution,” said Dan Doherty, executive vice president of operations and principal at Prairie State Group. “Brookfield helped get us up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible and it has gone above and beyond in supporting us. In less than one year we have experienced a positive return on investment and will be able to increase our efficiency and productivity going forward with Brookfield on our side.”

“In printing, the name of the game is to keep the presses running,” Doherty said. “By using Brookfield’s viscometers and partnering with Sun Chemical we have been able to reduce our ink costs with consistent runs. Very tight control of viscosity dramatically increases the mileage of the ink. Eliminating the need for most of our manual cup measurements also saves us money. It used to take almost one half hour just to measure and adjust the full eight stations. With the new control system that time is used elsewhere, while completely automating our process and maintaining ink consistency. Our operators tell us, ‘Finally, we can now open the presses up and let them run at full speed.’ The consistency we get from Brookfield’s AST is also critically important when it comes to color matching for our clients brands. We are using viscometers on 15 stations and couldn’t be happier with Brookfield. They have made an immediate impact on our return on investment within the first year.”