In Australia partly to research job prospects, Dutchman Gaby van Deventer was a welcome spreaker at the SWUG conference, as Peter Coleman reports. What if the platemakers and mailroom staff helped get the press plated and running, and then everyone pulled together to get products packed and out of the door? The relatively unusual picture of multiskilling and a culture of interdepartmental cooperation comes from Holland, and visiting speaker Gaby van Deventer. And – as readers of our GXpress November 2008 issue will know – an unusual site. Family-run contract newspaper printer F.D. Hoekstra Boom was the creation of founder Bauke Jaap Hoekstra, who died in 2006 at the age of 52, only weeks after ordering Europe’s first format-changeable Goss FPS press at the IfraExpo. The highly-automated two-tower press is a right-angled design and built to permit a change of cut-off, using modules and a unique splittable folder. Manning typically consists of two printers (one of whom is the team leader), compared to the four needed to run the less productive four-tower Universal 70 at the site. Both use another man at the splicers and two in the mailroom. The site produces a large number of short-run jobs, and on the FPS, one printer will break off after a saleable copy is produced, to organise plates for the next job. “Printers and non-printers are all responsible for production quality and speed,” van Deventer says. “They help the mailroom and the mailroom helps the printers, with splicer and mailroom personnel changing positions on a weekly or daily basis so they learn about production.” And he says splicer staff who “over achieve” are promoted and learn to be printers: “We don’t hire externally-educated printers,” he says. Van Deventer (34) himself dropped out of school and worked in a variety of jobs before being stabbed in the neck by members of a gang, after weighing in with his kickboxing skills in defence of a bartender. It took time even to learn to walk again, but in hospital, he decided he “had to do something with his life”. Two temporary stints helping at Hoekstra paved the way for a career there in prepress, and when the company established a new plant in Emerloord with a new Goss Universal 70 press in 2000, he was given responsibility for setting up the computer-to-plate facility. He also managed project groups which gained Ifra Color Quality Club and ISO 12647-3 recognition. “When I started at Hoekstra, there was a division between printers and prepress,” he says. “I suggested we took turns at each others’ jobs, and it has worked really well, creating a team.” Van Deventer sidesteps the human challenges associated with going ahead with installation of the FPS, which now prints the bulk of the 3.5 million newspapers produced a week: “The start of the FPS was beyond our imagination,” he says. The press was in production within 24 hours of first tests, in which only one roll of paper was used. He’s clearly proud of his involvement with a company which has grown 17 per cent per annum since 2001, and was the first to score a ‘perfect’ 100 per cent in the INQC competition. But now – with the future of his young family in mind – he’s looking for a job in Australia or New Zealand, and was visiting a number of sites before his return. Despite the uncertain economic conditions, we reckon he’s in with a chance!