Xaar 1003 printhead dramatically improves production output at Oscar Ceramics, Italy

Business owners of Oscar for Porcelain and Ceramic Production Srl (Oscar Ceramics), based in Sassuolo, Italy, took over this Italian tile manufacturer in 2015. A key focus for the business since the ownership change has been on production efficiency, with a tight control of production costs and quality.

“Production efficiency has been a major focus for us”, says Enrico Ascari, Director at Oscar. “It’s important for us to control the costs, quality and quantity of the tiles we produce”.

The Xaar 1003 printhead, which the tile manufacturer adopted for digital ceramic tile decoration in February 2016, has played an important part in the company’s efficiency drive by helping to dramatically improve production uptime and throughput, whilst delivering a high quality print onto their tiles.

Andrea Porta, Chief Designer at Oscar Ceramics, whose wide-ranging role involves creating tile designs as well as running the production line, has been delighted with the results after  moving to the Xaar 1003  “There are two principal challenges that I have to fight every day”, he says.  “One challenge is to be more flexible with production because the batch sizes are getting smaller. Another challenge is to produce the best print quality possible, as quickly as possible and without downtime, loss of production or loss of my own time. With this new printhead I have dramatically decreased machine downtime as printhead maintenance is required only once or twice in every 24 hours. This means I can increase production significantly”.  Andrea also says that since he usually handles printhead cleaning whilst the operators stop production to clean the glazing line, there is no additional loss of production due to printhead maintenance.

As Chief Designer at Oscar Ceramics, Andrea is also focused on producing the very best print quality too.  “As a designer I spend a lot of time researching and developing new designs. With this new printhead, all my work is printed well. We have hundreds of designs, hundreds of products, hundreds of images in production.  All my pictures, all my designs, all my work is safe with the Xaar 1003”.

As an added bonus, Oscar Ceramics found that when they moved from using the Xaar 1002 to the Xaar 1003 printheads, the integration couldn’t have been easier since the printheads are backward compatible with the Xaar 1002. “All we had to do was change the printhead and push start on the printer; there were no problems”, says Andrea Porta.

The market-leading Xaar 1003 is available in three variants: the Xaar 1003 GS12 (rich colours or higher speeds), the Xaar 1003 GS6 (for fine detail) and the Xaar 1003 GS40 (for special effects).