KBA Innovator Retires After 53 Years

Georg Schneider, head of the development department at KBA's main web press factory in Wurzburg (Germany) will retire on April 30 shortly after his 67th birthday.

His departure from KBA will come almost 53 years after he joined the company.

According to KBA, in the current debate on raising the pensionable age in Germany to 67, Georg Schneider is living proof that inventing groundbreaking concepts and ingeniously simple solutions to complex technical challenges has little to do with age and a lot to do with inherent skill, a willingness to take a fresh approach, the ability to motivate others and sheer hard work.

More than 700 patents have been awarded to date on over 150 of Georg Schneider's inventions.

Presses of all kinds, from small-format digital offset to KBA's Cortina waterless newspaper press, bear his signature, although with the modesty of an inspired engineer he tends to shun the spotlight, added the company.

Georg Schneider joined Koenig and Bauer (KBA) as an apprentice in 1954 and after qualifying as a machinist he was assigned to the drilling shop.

But production failed to hold his interest and from 1959 to 1961 he studied engineering technology at the Balthasar-Neumann Polytechnic in Wurzburg.

That was followed by 19 years in the engineering department working on stereotyping machines.

In 1980 Schneider transferred to the development department, where he was able to give full rein to his passion for developing new printing presses and processes, said KBA.

Promoted to head of printing-unit engineering in 1987, he found implementing new ideas much more appealing than the bureaucracy associated with managing a big department and in 1995 he returned to the development department as its head.

The company said that the role that KBA plays in developing new technology and processes for newspaper production - the Cortina and Commander CT presses, being just the latest - owes much to Georg Schneider's visionary creativity.

When a Commander CT that is already in operation at the Mainpost media group in Wurzburg is officially unveiled in September before an international audience, Georg Schneider will attend as a senior citizen.

Many of the UV offset systems built by KBA subsidiary KBA-Metronic for printing smart cards, CDs and DVDs were developed jointly by Georg Schneider and the company founder, Torald Rohloff.

and following his official retirement, Schneider is planning to continue those creative activities at the mid-cap enterprise a stone's throw from KBA.

Georg Schneider's successor is Bernd Masuch (46), who joined KBA in 1988 as a mechanical engineer in the newspaper press engineering department.

From 1993 to 1995 he was in charge of the commissioning department, after which he returned to press design as head of the engineering department and the competence centre for newspaper press printing units.

In 2003 he was appointed head of printing couple development in the web press development department, which he will head from May 1.

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