Swapping out a drum inserting system with two 19-hopper collating lines has equipped a Swiss newspaper printer for the needs of a changed market.

Spurred on by an increasing number of orders from the direct distribution sector, Freiburger Druck – based in the border triangle with France and Switzerland, and part of the BZ.Medien group – swapped an MSD line for Ferag’s EasySert/FlyStream collating lines, enabling the Breisgau production facility to produce the insert sets now demanded.

Koenig & Bauer’s Cortina waterless print technology has been part of the mix since 2006, helping the 225 staff to emphasise both premium and service quality while being proactive about protecting the environment.

The multi-awarded DIN ISO 14001-certified and EMAS-validated printer boasts a DIN ISO 9001 quality management system, with general manager Patrick Zürcher also signing the WIN Charta of Baden Württemberg in 2017. FSC-certification followed in 2020.

Freiburger Druck had refitted its mailroom in 2015, replacing the 1999 equipment with two lines, each with a MultiSert drum and EasySert line, specified for the needs of its daily and weekly newspapers and including units to feed preprints and supplements from disc.

Demand for automated order picking for advertising supplement sets was increasing significantly, and with the introduction of the minimum wage in Germany, drove the choice of the EasySert line.

In recent years, the company has acquired more orders of this kind, so that a second EasySert was considered in early 2021. When a new customer was landed, the investment made sense for back-up reasons as well as to expand capacity within the direct distribution sector. Both of these inserting lines at now have 19 hoppers, while the remaining MSD line has three stack pacers and one RollStream with 12 feeders. Ferag’s TapeFix system is again used for sealing supplement sets without carrier products.

Freiburger Druck makes up about 625,000 supplement collections of this kind a week, half of which are produced using the sealing system. Consolidating the Sunday newspaper printed in-house with direct distribution has eliminated the need to collect the other half, instead using the newspaper as main jacket.

A high-bay warehouse with bespoke supplement management software has been installed for incoming goods, and the Breisgau mailroom now processing five million supplements per week for direct distribution alone, with up to eight million passing through at peak times.

The up to 300 different types of supplements are checked and overseen by a specialist team, with Ferag software solutions playing a role in the administration.

“Incoming supplements are not only checked and registered, but also weighed and measured,” says operations manager Michael Wagner. “In certain cases, we specify some conditions for running certain supplements on a permanently defined feeder, and (the software) searches for the optimal combination of supplements so that we have as few modifications as possible while conserving as many resources as possible during production.”