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A Faustel five-roll coating line is bringing many benefits to Enterprise Coated Products after helping the company make a smooth transition to a new facility.
When release coatings specialist Enterprise Coated Products recently moved from an old plant outside of Chicago, IL, to a new, larger facility in Manteno, IL, its customers hardly knew the difference.
"A number of customers were surprised to learn we had moved," says Enterprise president Bill Novak. "The changeover happened [over the course of 1997] with so few hitches that we never missed a beat in terms of customer service."
A new coating line from Faustel, installed before the new facility opened, was one of the main reasons for the smooth transition.
A History of Service
Customer service has been critical to Enterprise's success since it was first established as the Enterprise Tape Co. back in 1964. For two decades, the company's silicone coating work was entirely aimed at satisfying internal needs. Only in 1985, with the installation of its first solventless coater, did Enterprise begin selling silicone-coated products on the outside. By the time the tape business was sold in. 1994, there was sufficient outside volume in silicone-coated paper to allow Enterprise Coated Products to become a thriving business on its own. Today, besides supplying release-coated roll form products to tape manufacturers, the company sells similar items to producers of label, automotive, medical, and construction products.
For Enterprise, service goes beyond quick, consistent delivery to include custom formulating for specific release values. The company brings this capability to even shorter coating runs, and this has won it a loyal customer base.
"Most converters offer only a set of standard release values," notes Novak. "And differential coatings, with a different release level on each side, are especially difficult for many customers to obtain." Enterprise has successfully offered such products for years on a densified kraft base and has more recently added similar products on a poly-coated kraft base. The company also coats clay-coated kraft base. (Substrate suppliers are proprietary.)
The main motivation for shifting the company's location was a desire to expand production capacity with a new coating line. The old facility was already cramped for space, and expansion at that site was not an attractive proposition.
Enterprise...