Stitching and Trimming Updates Scotsman's Mailroom

The Scotsman Publications decided that to cope with ever-increasing work, and as part of an continuing investment of GBP 22m in its printing plant, a radical update of its mailroom was required.

The Scotsman Publications, based in Edinburgh, decided that to cope with ever-increasing work, and as part of an continuing investment of GBP 22m in its printing plant, a radical update of its mailroom was required.

After a period of researching potential suppliers, the company subsequently made the transition to improve performance and capacity by completely re-equipping its entire mailroom with Ferag AG equipment.

Ever since the installation of its heat-set equipment around two and a half years ago, The Scotsman had been looking at a faster means of stitching and trimming.

The Scotsman currently pre-prints all heat-set material on a Goss Universal press, which is then hand-fed on to two saddle-stitch trimmers.

As production director Brian Marshall explained, whilst the 15-year-old equipment has traditionally been able to cope with the speed, work is expanding at an ever-increasing pace.

Marshall said: "We knew that when our heatset press was installed, we should seriously start looking at a new mailroom.

Although our existing equipment has served us well, we felt that the time was right to review the situation and ensure we made the right investment to take us forward and strengthen our flexibility." Marshall, along with The Scotsman's senior production manager Alan Emerson and engineering manager Bob Tulloch then embarked on a quest to seek out a worthy supplier to fulfil their exact specifications - visiting major sites across Europe to familiarise themselves with the various systems available.

That centred around two suppliers in particular, one of which was Ferag AG.

Having viewed a number of systems, the trio, along with The Scotsman's managing director, Steven Walker, felt that Ferag's systems were the best for their specifications.

Continued Marshall: "There are a number of reasons why we eventually opted to re-equip our facility with Ferag machines.

The over-riding factor that influenced our decision was the speed of Ferag's stitch-trimming drum, which is a much faster on-line stitch-trimming system than its closest competitor.

Another important factor that we had to consider was our lack of space - a big constraint, especially as our heat-set products require so much room.

The Ferag system offers a much smaller footprint than alternative options." Marshall conceded that having grown accustomed to its existing supplier for 10 years, the decision to change was not easy, but the expert approach from the Ferag AG team impressed him.

"The professionalism of WRH Marketing in the UK and their colleagues in Switzerland really swayed me.

The exact detail in their drawings and the very impressive performance of the kit they showed us in Europe, especially the stitch-trimming, was second-to-none," added Marshall.

The Scotsman is set to begin installation of the Ferag equipment in the late summer, with final completion date anticipated for around the end of 2006.

The extensive range of equipment also represents a UK first, in that it will blend heat-set with coldset - the Ferag Unidrum commercial gatherer stitcher will combine with the coldset inserting system, added Ferag.

The capability of Ferag's overall inserting equipment, as a whole is something that Marshall sees as contributing added value to The Scotsman's workflow.

Marshall went on: "A great deal of time and money is currently spent on collation.

We need to be able to deliver a final complete package and eradicate the need for manual insertion of magazines.

One requirement we have relates to a 250-page broadsheet paper - something that the Ferag equipment will easily cope with." The company prints all its own heat-set magazines before stitch-trimming and inserting in to the various titles, with four heat-set magazines a week at 100,000-120,000 copies.

Those comprise 'The Scotsman Magazine', 'Spectrum', 'At-Home' and local property magazine, 'ELPG'.

Efficiency and speed of turnover are two important requirements that are becoming more and more important to companies like The Scotsman Publications, not least because of the inherent problem of long turn-around times associated with printing magazines by heatset believes Ferag.

Explained Marshall: "As a newspaper printer we are used to short deadlines, so there's always an issue in that the same short deadlines can't be achieved for magazine printing by heat-set.

We will typically finish printing a heat-set magazine by mid-afternoon for insertion in the evening paper of the following day.

That's an incredibly quick deadline but if we have a very fast in-house system for stitch trimming then it's of huge benefit to us.

After all, this is where the bottle neck is, not the printing itself.

We are delighted that Ferag can offer us the capability to get around that and improve our workflow." Ferag AG systems for post-press processing in the newspaper and commercial printing industry are supplied in the UK and Ireland through WRH Marketing UK .

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