Offset Printing

Expansion Project Completed at Archant Print, Norwich, England

Tuesday 30. June 2009 - The major expansion project at Archant Print has been recently completed including the extensive reconfiguration of their control systems.

The addition of 4 towers and a fourth new folder would be a significant task under any circumstances but the range of both the existing equipment and the additions in terms of age and technologies provided many additional complications.

The complexity of the additions combined with ensuring that the required production capacity was always maintained stretched the project out to a timescale of over 20 months on site. A timeline of this magnitude always presents a challenge in terms of maintaining focus and performance. The multiple stages of the additions provided a huge task to manage a separate issue of software for each stage of the press reconfiguration.

One of the objectives being to bring the functionality of all units and folders to a single standard as previously only encountered on the newest parts of the press. The project also included the integration of many 3rd party systems such as QTI auto-registration and Baldwin dampening and blanket washing.

The early decision by Archant to consolidate into a single expanded print centre has certainly proved to be a wise move given the recent problems of the newspaper industry. The economies of scale will enable them to maintain a competitive position in the regional market with a four folder, ten tower configuration with flexible configuration capabilities and good back up.

Rob Watson, Sales Director for Harland Simon, commented, “Whilst press reconfiguration and extensions have become the backbone of our business resulting in specialized skills in this area the Archant project has pushed the envelope in terms of sheer complexity and duration. The on time completion is a credit to all involved in the project.”