Night after night, over 30 printing presses turn out 50 or more national and international newspapers at Bermont’s seven locations around Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Sagunt(Valencia), Seville,Lugo,Majorca (Balearic islands),Tenerife(Canary islands) . Along with the big Spanish dailies like “El Mundo”, “Marca” , “La Razon” and “El Pais” as well as several regional newspapers, the company is also contracted to print titles from around western Europe including “Bild Zeitung” from Germany, “The Times” and “The Daily Express” from the UK, “Corriere della Sera” from Italy and many other leading newspapers. This means Spain’s largest printing works must respond flexibly to print runs that may vary between 10,000 and 200,000 copies. So in mid-2016, the company was facing a question at its Madrid plant: how to complete all kinds of short runs for regional and international dailies both efficiently and reliably, with a high level of performance and low operating costs, and that in parallel with production of the major high-circulation titles.

The answer for Bermont Impresión in Madrid is the MiniSert inserting system, a modular, simply designed offline inserting line. With only modest financial resources it becomes possible to raise the inserting process to a new level while also boosting production reliability. The Ferag MiniSert can process up to 20,000 end products in one hour – straightforwardly, reliably and independent from chains and clips. Given the product structure at Bermont, the key criterion was the system's overall high flexibility rather than ultimate speed. The compact machine can complete main prints, preprints and supplements with very different formats: The main product format width can vary between 280 and 450 millimetres, with a format length from 210 to 310 millimetres. Preprints between 148–450 millimetres wide and 105–310 millimetres long are all processed reliably, and the inserting system can link directly to bundling equipment such as a stack turner.

Compact, reliable and user friendly
Even when a fast transition from manual to automated inserting is needed, companies are on the safe side with this small, Swiss-made system: thanks to its compact design, a MiniSert with up to six hoppers (modularly extensible from two to four to six hopper stations) will fit inside a standard 20-foot shipping container, making transport a breeze. Ferag can deliver a MiniSert inserting line just eight weeks after receipt of order; installation, commissioning and training together take no more than five days. And Ferag has kept its word to Bermont: their order arrived in December 2016 and production on the MiniSert began at the end of April, after only four days for installation and training. Since then at Coslada, print runs of 20,000 to 60,000 copies have been rolling out of the Ferag inserting system with its one main product and four preprint hopper stations.

Semi-automatic inserting
In its first month of operation at Bermont in Coslada, the MiniSert was already completing 256-page newspapers collated from 72 pages of main product and 184 preprinted pages. Ignacio Villanueva, Technical Manager at Bermont, is satisfied: “While larger runs are rolling off the presses, we now have the option of semi-automatic inserting in parallel with the main production. That makes us very flexible.” Moreover, the machine is simple so setting up does not require specially trained staff. This further contributes to the low running costs of this economical small system.

(http://www.ferag.com)