Business News

Burlington Free Press selects Harland Simon

Friday 29. October 2010 - Harland Simon secured yet another drives upgrade order (straight on the heels of The Gleaner Company Ltd., in Jamaica) this time at The Burlington Free Press, a Gannett site.

This continues a record breaking year for Harland Simon, who has secured eight new retrofit control customers in 2010 alone. These range from drives upgrades to full press control systems some including full on-unit control replacement. This latest upgrade will cover replacing Fincor drives on a Goss Metro Offset press.

The principles of the project are: Replacement of obsolete Fincor drives and PLC systems, elimination of all proprietary communications and replacement with an Ethernet/IP network connecting the six Allen-Bradley PowerFlex DC drives (see above) and Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLCs (main and standby). Furthermore, to increase supportability a touch screen HMI (see insert left) and central maintenance PC (pre-installed with full diagnostic software) will streamline fault finding procedures and allow for remote diagnostic support via a VPN line.


A major benefit to the Harland Simon solution is their system structure allowing staged installation and commissioning, which eliminates any risk or disruption 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 systems originally supplied by Goss, Rockwell Automation, manroland and Honeywell over the past 20 years.

John Staiano, Senior Vice President for Harland Simon commented, “We are very excited The Burlington Free Press have chosen Harland Simon to secure their production for the lifetime of their press.”

The project is due to be completed by the end of 2010.