With the purchase of our new premises, located on Central Park, Bridgend Industrial Estate, South Wales, finally completed at the start of September 2010, the race was on to get the building ready for occupation before the lease expired on our existing rented premises.

As a completely empty shell, this was a daunting task, but with the help of numerous good local tradesmen and the many hands of the ALTech UK team, both the offices and workshops were completed within one month to our specifications, with only a mezzanine floor for our new demonstration and storage area left to be fitted to complete plans.

The company officially moved in to the building in the middle of October 2010, and we have already welcomed numerous customers to our workshops to sign off their labelling machines or for demonstrations of some of our advanced machinery, such as our Linerless ALcode LL print and apply machine.

We are proud of the quality and innovative features of the labelling machinery we build, and would be delighted to welcome/test the products of any potential customers at our new workshops where we generally have demonstration or “in-build” examples of most types of labelling machines we produce, from ALstep labelling heads to ALline production line labelling machines, for jars and bottles as well as special build machines.

Our UK manufacturing site compliments our much larger Italian parent companies facilities, who's factory just outside Milan occupies an area of approximately 3,500 sq m - providing our customers with the quality and economies of scale of a labelling machinery company producing more than 1000 labelling machines per annum operating on a worldwide basis, with the flexibility of a smaller engineering company, building complete conveyor feed and handling systems to customers exact requirements through our UK build facilities.

Among the many enhancements of our comprehensive labelling machine range for 2011, there is one simple universal change to all our labelling machines that is receiving significant praise from our customers and shop floor operators.

To change the label reel on any of our labelling machines has been mechanically designed to be as simple and intuitive as possible - a competent operator can easily complete the task in less than 2 minutes, but often operators initially find it daunting because it can “look” complex.

The change to every labelling machine in our range for 2011 is therefore a simple one - a move to numbered rollers with directional arrows for loading the label reel – think “join-the-dots”, rather than the traditional web path diagram, which can often be confusing, rotationally wrong or obstructed from view as the operator loads the machine. So, simple, yet so very effective, child's play almost!

The move to the new numbered roller system was actually part borne out of manufacturing practicality, as well as customer feedback. Almost every labelling machine in our range has hundreds of possible configurations to solve almost any labelling application, with special machine configurations (for example to integrate into an OEM machine, such a flow wrap packaging machine) all requiring specific label web diagrams or diagrams to be rotated in the final position of the machine will be positioned (e.g. inverted for underside labelling).

In the numerous installations already completed this year with the new machine design, our engineering team have seen much greater confidence particularly from new users, in loading the machines, speeding product changeovers and reducing mechanical problems due to incorrect media loading - whilst generally making the machines more "liked" by the operators.