Offset Printing

manroland Business Forum Sheetfed Offset at Gerin, Austria

The print samples produced on the ten-color ROLAND 700 Ultima, printed and coated both sides in one pass through the press, were in great demand.

Monday 15. June 2009 - Printing: intelligent industry or impulsive bazaar?

The weather was glorious on 25 May and more than 200 guests turned up at the Paul Gerin printing company in Wolkersdorf near to Vienna, Austria. The question posed at the manroland Business Forum was: “Printing – intelligent industry or impulsive bazaar?” Here manroland showed how printing companies can be more successful through strategic pricing policies, environment-friendly practices, and clever capacity management. The venue for the event was well chosen: Gerin, one of Austria’s foremost sheetfed offset printers, has banked on innovative technology and a well thought out business model to differentiate itself from the competition. Gerin is the leading poster printer in the country and also produces labels and wrappers for chocolate and cigarette soft packaging plus folders, catalogs and financial reports for customers all over Europe in three-shift operation around the clock.

With a tour of the plant and print demonstrations, the visitors could see for themselves how a company can succeed with Value Added Printing. They were also impressed by the range of equipment at Gerin: two ROLAND 900, XXL presses for poster printing; a ROLAND 500 and a ROLAND 900 with two coating modules for packaging printing, and a ROLAND 700 Ultima. This ten-color press is a world’s first: five printing units, a coating module and dryer, then a perfector followed by another five printing units and another coating module with a ROLAND Seccomatic IR/hot-air dryer – this permits printing and coating on both sides of the sheet in one pass, a configuration that makes the ROLAND 700 Ultima in Wolkersdorf unique.

Future-oriented thinking
The goal of printing companies must be to make the best of the presently difficult economic situation and grow their business basis for the medium term. Some starting points and ideas for doing this can be taken from other industries and how these can be intelligently applied was explained by Dr. Markus B. Hofer of Simon-Kucher & Partners Strategy & Marketing Consultants GmbH in Cologne. Which of the many Value Added Printing approaches can be implemented in practice was illustrated by Sascha Ehrenberg, Product Manager for InlineSystems at manroland, in his address “More efficiency boosting and perceptible differentiation”. Efficiency is also the goal of “EcoLogic – economy through ecology” which bundles the environment protection activities in manroland’s sheetfed press business sector. Felix Ehrtmann, Product Management SelectSystems at manroland, pointed out the significance of environment-friendly production as a corporate strategy factor. The observations “More profitability through clever capacity management” made by Matthias Holder, Segment Manager at manroland, aroused great interest. How do I practically tackle the issue of capacity management that already starts in the investment phase which means the choice of a press or presses?

Comprehensively networked
Besides press technology, a decisive factor for efficient production is pressroom networking. The measures that Gerin has implemented together with the Rogler industry software company have increased job throughput by 30 percent since the project was started in 2003. Directly in the pressroom, Dipl.-Ing. Hannes Rogler explained to the visitors the benefits gained by automation of the printing operations through linking the software to a printnet workflow. And along with technology, the total package “press plus services” is becoming increasingly important. printservices includes services such as maintenance and upgrades. printcom offers process-compliant system components. Experts at the forum explained how services packages precisely matched to each customer’s business model can provide genuine added value in printing.

The Paul Gerin printing company
This company with a long tradition was founded in 1871 by printing pioneer and visionary Paul Gerin as “Buch-, Kunst- und Steindruckerei Gerin”. In 1978 the Gerin Printing Center was opened in Wolkersdorf in Austria’s wine quarter, and the years 2002 till 2007 were characterized by heavy investments with the prepress, printing and finishing operations all upgraded to the latest state of the art. The most recent investment was the ten-color ROLAND 700 Ultima which was installed at the beginning of this year.