Plant Investment Responds To Pagination Needs

Contract newspaper printer Webprint Concepts has invested in a new KBA Colora six-tower full colour press and mailroom equipment from Ferag AG for its new printing plant in Cork (Eire).

Contract newspaper printer Webprint Concepts has invested in a new KBA Colora six-tower full colour press and mailroom equipment from Ferag AG for its new printing plant in Cork (Eire).

The move has won the printer a long outsourcing contract with publisher Thomas Crosbie Holdings (TCH), which owns two Irish daily newspapers, the Irish Examiner and Evening Echo and The Sunday Business Post, as well as 11 regional titles.

Printing over two million copies of broadsheet and tabloid formats each week, the new press will be able to run at 75,000 copies per hour (cph), enabling Webprint Concepts to produce 192 pages tabloid or the equivalent in broadsheet when the press is run in collect mode.

That is an improvement in capacity and performance that requiring an efficient mailroom, said Ferag.

The Ferag order will provide a flexible post-processing system for the different structures of TCH's publications and third party contracts.

According to the company, it will allow the printer to consolidate its printing requirements in one building and respond to the publishers' requirements of higher pagination, more colour and efficient handling of inserts.

At the centre of the new mailroom will be two Multisertdrum inserting lines with Rollstream coupled with Jetfeeders for business and small commercial inserts.

Furthermore, the installation contains one SNT-U trimming drum, Discpool, Multidisc winding and unwinding stations, the universal conveyor UTR, Multistack bundling units with Quickstrap strapping machines, wrapping equipment, and a bundle conveyor PKT.

Barry Pearson, who is managing the project at Webprint Concepts, said: "This is a huge project and we chose Ferag for several reasons.

Ferag's inserting equipment is extremely flexible and will allow us to handle supplements of varied formats, providing unlimited possibilities when structuring the publications to the needs of the market.

In addition, by choosing Ferag we are keeping several options open for the future as there are various expansion possibilities should future requirements change." Pearson, along with his managing director Donagh O'Doherty, travelled extensively throughout Europe to seek the right mailroom supplier for the venture.

He said: "Our specifications were very exact and demanding.

Eventually we found that Ferag's equipment was best suited to our needs - it's reliable, versatile and optimises the floor space available.

To top it all, it's affordable and we believe it will provide fast return on investment, in particular because we'll save a considerable amount of money and labour through automation.

For us, Ferag is the market leader in post-processing technology." The project is set to finish this month, one year after building on the greenfield site commenced.

The mailroom installation was started last October.

"WRH Marketing UK and its Swiss colleagues have been exceedingly professional and couldn't do enough for us.

We, including the technical team, are constantly informed and the liaison between the teams is superb.

Having seen the company's detailed drawings, we are absolutely confident that all the equipment will be running in early 2006," added Pearson.

Following initial discussions with WRH Marketing UK - UK agent to EAE, Technotrans and Q I and other suppliers - Webprint Concepts has also ordered two control desks, management maintenance software and logistics maintenance systems from EAE.

The company has also ordered ink supply and filtration systems from Technotrans, as well as automatic press register and colour control systems from Q I, all of which will be supplied and coordinated by KBA.

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