Newspaper & Mailroom

Harland Simon to secure production for Tribune Review, PA

Wednesday 16. April 2014 - Harland Simon is pleased to announce that the Tribune-Review, PA, one of Trib Total Media's production facilities has contracted with Harland Simon to replace its aging and obsolete press control system on its Goss Universal 70 Press. With the increased demand on their press and the lack of component availability for the existing Rockwell Automation control systems, the Tribune-Review, PA had to act in order to guarantee delivery of their numerous publications.

The project is to include the replacement of on-unit Ink, Damp and Registration controls and desk upgrades at their facility in Warrendale, PA. The upgrade will be carried out in two phases, part one will be the replacement of the Rockwell MPU [Z809] by a PC based system with control touch screens mounted on each desk, replacing the obsolete desk drop-in controls. Also included in this phase will be the ability to calculate and preset the current inker controls. At this stage the Z859 and Z808 controllers remain on the units, interfaced via HDLC to the new PCs (MPU replacements).
The second phase of the upgrade will be to replace the Rockwell Ink/Registration [Z808] modules with a simple multiplexor and control circuits using an off-the-shelf ARM processor chip; a repeat of inker controls already used by Harland Simon on Goss units in Europe. The upgrade will also comprise of replacing the Damp [Z859] controller with Allen-Bradley Logix controllers (one per level); both utilizing Ethernet communication back to the MPU replacement PC and desk console screens.
John Staiano, Managing Director – Americas for Harland Simon, commented, “We have been working with the team at TTM for a while now to make sure the solution for their U-70 complies with their on-going goals and financial expectations.”
Harland Simon’s upgrade methodology means that throughout the project the existing system will remain operational until the new system is fully tested in order to remove any risk to production. Costs are minimized by retaining elements of the old system that can still be used and supported. It’s an approach that Harland Simon have used on many occasions previously on systems supplied by EAE, Goss, Rockwell Automation, Honeywell and manroland.
This upgrade follows on from other successful Goss Universal upgrades in North America, Europe and around the World.