Acknowledged by Sean Tait as “the little engine that did”, Fairfax Media’s North Richmond production centre has been named the first PANPA print centre of the year.
The award recognizes the site’s achievement in transforming to handle a workload expanded to include production of metro daily the Sydney Morning Herald: “No print centre has undergone so much change in the past year,” judges said, acknowledging “a terrific job”.
In his acceptance speech, Tait – who is print centre manager at North Richmond – nodded to a GXpressreport in August 2012, which analysed the challenges facing Fairfax with the transfer of work with the closure of its Chullora (Sydney) and Tullamarine (Melbourne) print centres, making paralells with the “little engine” in a popular children’s story and accompanying the story with a cartoon.
In an exclusive interview, Fairfax print and distribution chief executive Bob Lockley referred to the cartoon and added, “You should do a new one with the steam train going along at 100 bloody miles an hour.”
The transformation at North Richmond, 60 kilometres from Sydney – and a similar exercise in Ballarat, 110 km out of Melbourne – is part of the Australian group’s ‘Fairfax of the Future’ programme.
“It’s very unusual to say this, but we’re on budget, on deadline and will achieve the savings we proposed,” says Lockley, “and with a payback of under a year.”
Facing diminishing print circulations, Fairfax had spent to save: A capital expenditure of $42 million set to deliver savings in excess of $40 million in the first year, plus the proceeds of the real estate freed up in Chullora and Tullamarine.
“So it’s a pretty attractive deal, and as Greg (Hywood, Fairfax’s chief executive) will tell everybody, we’re in newspapers until they’re not profitable, and while they’re profitable we’ll keep printing them,” he says.
Half of the 18 double-width manroland Geoman press towers, all of the folders and Ferag mailroom equipment from Tullamarine have been redeployed at the two key regional sites or earmarked for projects in New Zealand and elsewhere. The remainder – including another nine towers – have been cannibalised for parts or scrapped, and virtually the whole of the 22-tower, five-folder Colorman pressline, and most of the seven Muller Martini Newsliner inserting lines and mailroom system installed in Chullora at a cost of $340 million is being scrapped.
Peter Coleman
• Read the full interview in GXpress Magazine’s August edition, out in a couple of weeks, and online on publication.
Pictured on our homepage: Sean Tait collects the award from DIC Australia’s Jason Kent
Right: A three-tower manroland Geoman press relocated to the North Richmond site