Hands off: The press system that just wants to be left alone

Dec 11, 2010 at 10:38 pm by Staff


It has everything else you can imagine amid its tightly-integrated and interconnected systems and software, including robots and the ability to ‘call home’ if it’s feeling queasy (writes Peter Coleman).

So what if the ‘one touch’ printing machine at Germany’s ‘Freie Presse’ had a social media account: Would it Tweet (@chemnitzpress, perhaps) with steely, ice-maiden resolve, “Thanks, but I can do that myself”

For this is truly a newspaper production system which can do pretty much everything on its own. Yes, the manroland APL plateloading robots on the six-tower Colorman XXL press need their cassettes filled from the sorters located by the press towers. And yes, there’s a guy preparing splices and moving reels around to points convenient to the paster logistics.

Two press operators per folder monitor performance and (ostensibly, at least) make detail adjustments on the two consoles. But you’re left with the firm conviction that the system – QI Press Controls’ Intelligent Density System – is doing fine by itself.

It’s a conundrum the industry may have to live with for a while: Can man do better than machine… and if not, how do you let him know that?

And in the context of profit and investment pressure, one which may be resolved sooner rather than later: The IDS system – which produces a standardised result by comparing print with TIFF prepress data – is now running on 60 towers worldwide and already unions in Belgium have agreed that two of the three desks at the Corelio print site can be switched off, and the press operated by a single person.



I’m in Chemnitz, a four-hour train trip from the IfraExpo city of Hamburg which takes you – via Berlin, of course – through the time-warp of the former East Germany into a fast growing region which is benefitting not inconsiderably from the taxpayer Euros being pumped into it from the west.

And if the future of printed daily newspapers lies with intensely-localised editions, the publishers of the ‘Freie Presse’ reckon they have the production requirements covered. Theirs is a punt based on a ten-year return on investment covering one of the world’s most automated print sites.

The new plant delivers 19 slip editions totalling 300,000 copies – with runs between 8000 and 65,000  copies – for readers across most of the modern state of Saxony, via a customised mailroom facility able to microzone inserts to as few as 150 subscribers.

Most of the printing for the flagship title is in a five-hour window: Although the first pages for the night editions are available about 6pm, the plate flow starts about 8 pm and printing at 10 pm. A further timed edition follows for 12.30 and printing is all over by 3am to ensure readers get their copies by 6am.

The main product and local section each vary between eight and ten Berliner-size pages broadsheet, and both this and preprints are printed ‘straight’. When I visited, they had just produced a 24-page broadsheet in two sections, with six more broadsheet, a 16-page tabloid and ten-page advertising supplement inside.

Everything is in full colour, and if you add to that, Wednesday and Sunday freesheets with a total circulation of 1.04 million in 18 editions – and plans to take this to 1.3 million – it’s clear that there is a significant print requirement.

One current measure is the 3000 (and sometimes 4000) printing plates which have to be imaged, transported, mounted and removed every day.

A two-stage investment in mailroom and press systems is a massive vote of confidence in the future of printed newspapers, albeit one which is being made to a greater or lesser extent at other publishing centres in Europe.

Nor is any great part of the ROI coming from the traditional source of reduced paper waste: They had covered that already through automatic colour registration on an earlier press, and expect only a further half to one per cent saving outside what a shorter cutoff (from 520 to 510 mm) will deliver.

German press makers have been reasonably successful in selling the manning and productivity benefits of triple-wide kit in Germany and other parts of the world. What’s unusual about the Chemnitz plant is the combination of automatic closed-loop colour control and plateloading robots in the initial investment, and even presorted plates are delivered automatically to the press on a ‘just in time’ basis. Industry interest in these systems was underlined when an open day in September attracted eight representatives from KBA and three from Goss.

The upgrade path of Chemnitzer Verlag und Druck was to tackle mailroom and distribution first, then the press. A 37,000 m2 building dates from 1993 and houses press, mailroom and logistics departments plus an inhouse mail distribution service. Freie Press distributes direct to readers and has a team of 2500 paper boys and girls.

A mailroom upgrade in 2007 saw the installation of three Ferag UTR lines including one eight-station and two 16-station Rollstream precollators, SNT-U inserting drums, inline stitching, and Triliner units which attach stickers and cards. A customised regional system for advertising inserts can handle microzones down to 150 subscribers, and delivers an edge for the publisher.

Technical director Erik Hofmann says it’s a competitive market between freesheets and direct distribution with two strong competitors plus the German post office: “Our advantage is from quality and automation,” he says.

Those elements are emphatically reinforced in the press upgrade. A six-tower manroland Colorman XXL autoprint press with three folders (all with inline stitching) was installed in the presshall previously occupied by four Uniman 4/2 presses without interrupting production. The first three towers and a folder were running at the end of 2008, another three by mid-2009, and finally the third folder was commissioned in November, following removal of the old 12-tower pressline and building modifications.

Completion of the paper store followed in December, with the QI subproject starting the following month with acceptance including IDS by the middle of this year.

Hofmann says the whole project started in 2005 with evaluation, and the press order placed in October 2007. “Then we started taking the first Uniman apart in April 2008 and had the first press running and ready for training technical staff by December,” he says.



With so much in contention, the production workflow is complex, with planning and customised manroland printnet OM – for which Chemnitz was a development partner – at its centre. Monitor (statistics), BDE (additional data management) and MainSys modules, manroland’s CutCon C print-to-cutoff control, and softproofing, QI’s markless IDS and the Nela Plateflow radiate from these. The printnet system optimises the press for each run, managing configuration and changeovers.

There’s no automatic colour registration system on the press, the view being that it will not be required with the towers’ nine-cylinder satellite configuration.

Six consoles serve the presses, each with Pecom touch-screens, soft-proofing and screens for QI’s IDS system.  Hofmann says the two-consoles-per-press set-up is “right for 48-pages”, but admits the manning is planned for the whole machine. “We need two printers for the change process,” he says.

Splice preparation is semiautomatic, with paper coming in via an Aurosys paper store system using AGVs and one person looking after paper for the whole press.

As an alternative to loading cassettes for the APL robots – of which there are four for each of the six towers – and then transporting them, single plates are transported to the press and placed manually into the cassettes.

Four Kodak GenerationNews 300 platesetters, linked to three Nela VCP900 optical plate punches, serve plates to a Nela transport system commissioned in mid 2009. Four plate stations at two levels alongside the press collate barcoded plates which have been imaged in the order and positions required under Nela’s PlateFlow control.

Typically, the APL robots will have completed makeready of all the printing units in a press within three minutes.

“When an edition good copy is achieved, a signal is sent to the system to make plates for the next edition,” says printing head Andy Ebersbach.

The thermal plates – not yet standard in Germany – deliver excellent quality and stability, the Kodak system replacing ten-year-old Purup green laser technology.

Despite an excellent earlier partnership with QI for automatic colour registration, which had delivered a return on the investment in 24 months, Chemnitz named manroland as main contractor for the whole project. Hofmann says it was a “good decision” to have single responsibility because of the many interfaces and “challenges for both parties”.

“It’s been a great partnership between QIPC, manroland and Chemnitz,” Hofmann says. “We had absolute acceptance of IDS from manroland and ourselves, and fulfilment of our goals of automation and quality.”

He says the 12-camera IDS system – covering each side of the six webs – is less labour-intensive because it handles colour corrections automatically, and ink presetting makes an important contribution. “We get reproduction with absolute colour stability, independent of the job or press, with sale copies at 500 copies, then perhaps 150-200 for change editions,” he says.

“There is less waste because of automatic colour optimisation after starting up, and with no need for colour bars, a greater printable area.”

Ink optimisation (using ppi software) and “perfect ink density” from the IDS system contribute to reduced ink consumption.

Above all, the total staff requirement has been halved, from 150 to 75 people.

The focus has been to create a ‘future-proof’ plant, equipped to resist growing pressure on printed news and advertising media. The outcome balances the needs of employees and the environment, with “absolute minimum” labour costs and stable best-in-class colour quality for readers and advertisers.

With advertising stable if not growing, the publisher is already making plans to exploit its new-found capacity with more editions and the possibility of new publications including freesheets and magazine products. “Since 2009, we have taken on a number of additional contract jobs,” he says. “It’s the perfect set-up for us. We’re fast and very competitive.”

 

‘Freie Presse’ Chemnitz
• The largest newspaper in the modern state of Saxony, and pre-unification the largest regional in the former GDR, it has 19 editions with a paid circulation of 286,000 copies and readership of 713,000.
• ‘Blick’ advertising papers add another million copies a week through 18 editions.
• Content comes from a team of 150 editorial staff in Chemnitz and 100 more in 20 regional locations linked to the Funkinform system.
• Publishing and advertising runs on SAP M/SD using XML-based systems.
• Plates from a Kodak thermal CTP system are punched and transported using Nela technology.
• Three two-tower manroland Colorman XXL autoprint 6x2 presses have a total of 24 robots which can change all the plates in three minutes.
• Prepress data is used by the markless QI Press Controls system in CIELab* format to control and optimise production within ISO 12647-3 specification. The maker says use of the system can result in savings of 30 per cent of printing costs.
• An afternoon shift produces preprints including travel and car sections in a mix of tabloid and broadsheet formats, with the main section (main and a second edition) printed at night in a five-hour production window.


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