The company installed the KBA Cortina waterless presses in 2006, investing in other automated equipment to help reduce costs and time of production, such as:
- paper logistics
- platemaking (with three Kodak Trendsetter News lines, 160 plates per line) which is integrated into the pressroom. Plates are automatically sorted by coding.
- automatic plate changing, taking about two minutes per change, reducing the rate of plate feed and removal to below 0.1 percent.
Much of this has helped to reduce material costs with no disposal of chemicals in the CTP process, paper waste rate to 2.3 percent, savings of 49,000 litres of damping solution and 1.730 million litres of damping wetting per year, and a 30 percent reduction in cleaning cloth.
With automatic pagination, platemaking and blanket washing, Mr. Kneile says the company has saved significant production time
Naturally, there have been costs in personnel. In the CTP room, with the exception of putting some chemicals in, it requires no staff so they were able to reduce staff by five there, and overall in the plant from 14 employees to 6.
Like other said during the conference, automation doesn’t always make sense in some areas. For this company, there are no planned investments for automated splice preparation nor plate feeding into the tower nor automatic ink density control.
