Prepress

Harland Simon complete their 1st Drive Upgrade in Latin America

Monday 24. June 2013 - El Mercurio recently added a second Goss Colorliner press [originally installed at Fox Valley, IL] as an extension to their current Colorliner installation, completing eight 4/4 towers and two folders allowing El Mercurio to run multiple jobs simultaneously with different product combinations to both folders; however, due to the incompatibility of the software between the drive masters El Mercurio was unable to select motors between the folders as required. That is when El Mercurio needed a viable solution to their drive selectivity problem.

The solution presented by Harland Simon was to replace both Master PLC5s with non-proprietary, off-the- shelf and more importantly locally available Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs [plus stand-by Masters] and programme these new controllers to work with existing 1395 Allen-Bradley drives, while still providing a cost effective and supportable solution.
Harland Simon was selected due to successfully meeting three main criteria: Cost, tight delivery timetable and most importantly the right technical solution. Mr. Claudio Munoz, Planning and Project manager for El Mercurio commented, “We selected Harland Simon because they have a neat solution using open components you can easily find in the local market, which is very critical and cost effective for newspaper operations. Also, our technicians already had experience with the Allen-Bradley technology, which helped reduce the learning curve, which is a key issue in newspaper maintenance and operations. With these variables on the table, the investment/benefit of the solution from the corporate point of view paid back by itself “
As with all Harland Simon offerings, the existing system remained operational until the new system was fully tested and commissioned, which eliminated any risk to production. This method also kept costs down while replacing all the vulnerable parts of the system. The solution was based on techniques that have been successfully developed for the replacement of many systems originally supplied by other press and drives manufacturers for over the past 40 years.
John Staiano, Harland Simon’s Managing Director – Americas further commented, “This will be the second solution Harland Simon has installed in Santiago, Chile for El Mercurio [first was ink pre-setting calculating and interface into the Goss press control system]. It has been tremendously satisfying to do business with El Mercurio again, especially to have worked closely with great professionals such as Mr. Claudio Munoz, Mr. Pedro Moral and Mr. José Abarca. I hope this on-going successful business relationship lasts for many years and this is the first of many new projects in South America”