Prepress
Mail Tribune selects Harland Simon
Monday 21. June 2010 - Following on from the success at The Times Herald Record, NY and Cape Cod Times, MA, Harland Simon has been selected by Mail Tribune-Medford, OR for replacing the press control system on their Goss Metro press. The conversion will be carried out in early 2011; in addition, the press will continue to produce all its publications throughout the upgrade [a procedure designed by Harland Simon in converting busy presses and particularly single press facilities].
The project includes replacement of the main press controls, installation of two Prima 6000 operator consoles and supply of a comprehensive suite of management system modules including direct ink presetting, production planning, monitoring and reporting.
The principles of the upgrade are: Replacement of obsolete quality and folder controls with PRIMA 6000 control consoles and PressNet system; all proprietary communications are eliminated and replaced with an Ethernet/IP network connecting dual (includes back-up) Press Master PLCs and remote I/Os at the units, Reelstands, Compensators and Drives with serial interfaces controlling new CGI digital inkers and Ryco dampeners.
At all times, the existing system will remain operational until the new system is fully tested and commissioned, which eliminates any risk to production. This method also keeps costs down while replacing all the vulnerable parts of the system. The solution is based on techniques that have been successfully developed for the replacement of many control systems originally supplied by Goss, Rockwell Automation, manroland and Honeywell over the past 15 years.
Tim Grogan, Mail Tribunes Pressroom Manager commented, “John [Staiano] was very interested in negotiating the exact package that we wanted and we are very excited to be moving forward on the upgrade of our press controls with Harland Simon
.We feel it will prove very beneficial to bring all the ink, dampening, registration and folder controls to a central location while retaining all of the current on-unit controls. We believe it will give us greater control of waste reduction and increase the quality of all our products. With the warm standby that we built into systems, it should greatly reduce the risk of ever having extended production down time due to system failure. I look forward to going live with this project.”
John Staiano, Senior Vice President for Harland Simon, further commented, “This just goes to show that todays newspapers are still motivated to replace obsolete hardware, while continuing to reducing on-going cost and minimizing risk – this is what Harland Simon does.”
This will be the third controls upgrade project Harland Simon has undertaken within Dow Jones Local Media Group, these being Times Herald Record-Middletown, NY, which was successfully completed first quarter of 2008 [which straight away saw a considerable reduction in the amount of paper waste and ink required to produce their publications] and Cape Code Times, MA, which was completed last year.
In addition, earlier this month Harland Simon signed a contract with Dow Jones to transfer their newsprint allocations systems [Prima RTS] from shuttered Dow Jones facilities into five LMG sites; for Cape Cod Times, Times Herald Record and now Mail Tribune, this will mean full integration with Prima MS.