中文There is a specific point at which a product catalog stops being a marketing asset and starts being a manufacturing problem. For MasterCut Tool, a US manufacturer of precision carbide cutting tools, that point arrived somewhere in the tens of thousands of active part numbers. Every end mill, drill and burr the company ships travels inside a rigid plastic case, and every one of those cases has to carry a unique part number, a technical description and the regulatory markings that industrial buyers require. No two cases share artwork. There is no family design that can be printed once and applied broadly. Each item is, in decoration terms, a run of one.
That is the arithmetic that broke every conventional option the company considered, and the way MasterCut eventually resolved it — working with Vermont-based Engineered Printing Solutions over more than a decade — offers a useful case study for any manufacturer whose SKU count has outgrown its packaging process.
Why the Obvious Answers Failed
The default solution for variable product identification is a pressure-sensitive label. It is cheap per unit, endlessly variable and requires no investment in the substrate itself. But labels carry costs that do not appear on a per-piece quote. There is the material spend, the labor to apply them, the inventory of pre-printed stock, and the rework when the wrong label reaches the wrong case. In the environments where carbide tooling actually lives — machine shops with coolant, oil, swarf and constant handling — there is also the durability question. A label that peels, smears or lifts at the corner turns a precision product into a support call.
The analog print alternatives were worse. Pad printing and screen printing both deliver excellent, durable marks directly onto plastic, and both are entirely reasonable choices for a company producing a handful of variants at volume. Neither survives contact with a catalog of twenty thousand unique designs, because each design demands its own tooling. A screen or a pad plate per SKU is not a consumable; it is a physical library that has to be made, stored, retrieved, mounted, cleaned and eventually replaced. Michael Shaluly, president and CEO of MasterCut Tool, put the problem in blunter terms, describing that approach as producing not a packaging program but a museum of clichés. His summary of the underlying constraint is hard to argue with: there is no analog process that makes the math work.
A Two-Tier Digital Model
The architecture EPS and MasterCut settled on is notable because it did not standardize on a single machine. Instead, it deliberately runs two different direct-to-object inkjet platforms side by side and routes work between them.
Short and mid-length runs go to multiple Fjet multi-pass systems. Multi-pass inkjet is the flexible end of the spectrum: changeovers are fast, there is no tooling to swap, and the economics hold up when a job is a few dozen or a few hundred pieces. That is exactly the profile of the long tail, where the great majority of a twenty-thousand-SKU catalog actually lives.
High-volume work goes to an XD70 single-pass platform. Single-pass inkjet trades some of that changeover agility for throughput, printing in one continuous motion rather than building the image over repeated head passes. For the fraction of SKUs that run continuously and account for a disproportionate share of units shipped, that throughput is what makes digital decoration cost-competitive with the analog processes it replaced.
Binding the two together is a single shared digital artwork workflow. This is the quiet structural achievement of the installation. Because both platforms draw from the same artwork source, MasterCut can send a job to whichever machine produces the lowest cost per unit for that particular run length, and get consistent output either way. The decision becomes a scheduling question rather than a design or engineering question.
What Changed on the Floor
The measurable outcomes fall into three categories. Label-related costs — material, application labor, and the associated inventory — have been eliminated rather than reduced. Rework has dropped, because there is no longer a mismatch risk between a stack of pre-printed labels and the parts they were meant for. And the cost of introducing a new SKU has collapsed to the cost of updating an artwork file.
That last point is the one with strategic weight. In the previous model, catalog expansion carried a hidden tooling tax: every addition meant new plates or screens, new storage, new setup procedures. Under the DTO model, a new part number enters production through a file update and nothing else. Production does not stop, and no physical asset needs to be manufactured first. A company whose competitive position depends on breadth of range has effectively removed the friction from growing that range.
MasterCut also emphasized the value of running both technologies together rather than choosing between them — some SKUs move in small batches while others run continuously, and having multi-pass and single-pass available in parallel lets each job find its most cost-effective home.
Cost Engineering, Not Technology Replacement
Ken Stack, executive chairman at EPS, framed the project in terms that deliberately downplay the hardware. This is about cost engineering, he said, not technology replacement. The distinction matters. The pitch is not that inkjet is inherently superior to pad or screen printing; for the right job, it is not. The pitch is that a complex SKU mix creates a routing problem, and digital printing is the only decoration method flexible enough to let a manufacturer solve that problem job by job.
EPS says it works with manufacturers specifically to evaluate where digital inkjet can improve cost, simplify workflow and scale production — language that positions the company as an analyst of production economics as much as a supplier of printers. For print service providers watching industrial decoration as an adjacent market, that positioning is worth noting. The persuasive argument to a manufacturer is rarely about resolution or color gamut. It is about what happens to the cost curve when the catalog doubles.
For MasterCut, the conclusion is unambiguous. As Shaluly framed it, direct-to-object inkjet is not a convenience for the business. Without it, the catalog does not ship.
Source: WhatTheyThink, August 21, 2026 — EPS’s DTO Inkjet Solutions Help MasterCut Tool Cut Packaging Costs & Optimize Production Across 20,000+ SKUs
