Why Speed Nearly Made Us Buy the Wrong Flexo Press—and Why the Gallus Flexo Press Won
When we started looking for a replacement flexographic press in early 2023, I did what I always do as the person who runs purchasing: I built a spreadsheet.
The columns were price, lead time, web width, maximum speed, and warranty. Then I sorted by speed. On paper the decision looked easy. Our eighteen-year-old press couldn't keep up, and the pressroom kept telling me the fix was higher feet per minute.
To be clear, I'm not a press operator and I don't pretend to be one. I manage purchasing for a 140-person label converter outside Milwaukee. My usual world is inks, plates, anilox rolls, proofing supplies, and vendor contracts. But in 2023 I also got handed the capital-equipment project. It taught me that the most quoted number on a press spec sheet—maximum speed—is often the least useful one.
We thought the problem was speed
In the twelve months before the project, our worst month ended with nearly a third of orders going out late. Sales blamed capacity. Operations blamed the aging press. The obvious answer was to buy something faster.
Then our production manager pulled a year of job history, and the story changed. Average order length had dropped about 35% since 2019. Brand owners kept cutting order sizes and shortening lead times, so our mix had shifted toward more jobs with smaller quantities. We weren't late because long runs couldn't physically run faster. We were late because the press was still in setup while the next job waited.
Speed was not the bottleneck. Makeready was.
Makeready—the time between the last saleable sheet of one order and the first saleable sheet of the next—was taking 60 to 90 minutes on almost every job. Some of it was mechanical setup: registration, impression, web tension. The deeper issue was memory. Our old press could not remember its own settings. Every repeat job was set up from scratch, with operators hunting for the same sweet spots they found last week.
It's tempting to think you can compare flexo presses by maximum speed. But maximum speed only counts once the press is running well. In a plant full of short and medium runs, the number that really drives throughput is how quickly you can move from Job A to Job B, and how few feet of material you throw away while doing it.
The question everyone asks a press vendor is, “What is the top speed?” The question we should have started with is, “How long does it take to go from the last good sheet of Job A to the first saleable sheet of Job B?”
What the bottleneck was quietly costing us
Once we started measuring, the numbers got uncomfortable. Across our two presses, we averaged about twenty job changeovers a week. Average changeover time was roughly 65 minutes. That is about 22 hours of non-printing press time every week.
Apply a loaded press rate—equipment, labor, and allocated overhead, not just the operator wage—of around $225 per hour, and the problem cost us about $4,900 a week. Don't hold me to those exact rates; your own accounting will look different. The structure of the math is the point. We were losing roughly $250,000 a year to changeover before counting the film we scrapped on every startup.
The workaround made it worse. To protect delivery dates, schedulers built extra quantity into orders—sometimes 15% to 20% more than the customer asked for—because they didn't trust that anyone could reprint a label and match it later. Printed labels are perishable. Brands redesign, packaging laws change, products get discontinued. At the end of 2023, we recycled about $40,000 worth of obsolete labels. That write-off was a cost the spreadsheet never showed.
Color consistency was the same story. Brand teams measure printed color with a spectrophotometer, and most critical color audits use the common industry reference from the Pantone matching system: keep Delta E below 2, understand that 2 to 4 is visible to a trained observer, and above 4 is obvious to almost anyone. Our old press could eventually get there, but often only after several hundred feet of startup waste. We were paying for makeready in two currencies: hours and material.
What changed when we tested Gallus
By the time we short-listed vendors, the columns on my spreadsheet looked different. Instead of comparing maximum speed first, we looked at how each press handled changeover, whether it stored job-specific settings, what startup waste looked like during a trial, and what service support looked like after the sale.
I'll be honest: when our production manager suggested adding Gallus, I pushed back. I didn't want to pay for a badge. My original speed-sort had put Gallus lower down the list. What convinced me is that the Gallus team did something simple: they counted.
The Gallus flexo press they brought us to test was a TCS 250. They asked to run one of our repeat jobs, on our own film, against our approved color standard, while they kept a public log of setup time and waste. The first run was fine. The repeat run sold me—the press remembered the job. The second setup was faster and used less waste because the settings were stored instead of being rediscovered.
The color result was just as convincing. Before we even had a chance to ask for adjustments, the color bar was inside the tolerance that most brand audits expect. On our old press, the first pull was usually a diagnosis, not a saleable label. That difference is exactly what makeready waste looks like in real life.
To be fair, other presses on the short list had some of the same capabilities. What separated Gallus in the end was service. They could answer the questions we should have asked from the beginning: where are spare parts stocked, who trains the operators, and what data does the press give us after installation.
What I would tell another buyer now
If you're in the middle of the same decision, start with your job history, not with press brochures. Pull twelve months of order data and calculate your average run length and number of changeovers per shift. Then take that data to every vendor and make them prove they can handle your actual mix.
The checks that mattered for us were simple:
- Ask for a trial using your own film, your own job file, and your own color standard.
- Ask how the press stores and recalls job settings for repeat orders.
- Ask to see the setup log and startup waste, not just the pretty sample.
- Ask where the closest stocked spare parts are before you talk price.
A Gallus printing press was not the winner of my original speed-sort spreadsheet. It also was not the cheapest quote. It won on the process that mattered: getting from the end of one job to the start of the next without burning hours and material. For a label printer with a mix like ours, that process is the whole game.
Would I make the same decision again? Yes. Not because the press has no bad days—it does, and so does every other machine in our plant. But we stopped buying the number that looked impressive in a brochure and started buying a solution to the problem we actually had.