Kaakon Viestintä employs 800 people and is the leading newspaper group in the southeast region of Finland. Over the last years Kaakon Viestintä has restructured and merged its three production sites into one main print production facility in Kouvola, 1,5 hour east of Helsinki.

The KBA A510 press dates to 1991 and has served its owner well over the years. With seven daily newspapers supplemented by twenty-one weeklies and bi-weeklies, Kaakon Viestintä produces about 1.000.000 copies per week.

With the increasing amount of titles to print, Kaakon Viestintä found it necessary to investigate their options for increasing productivity and lower production costs in order to strengthen their market position.

Matti Härmä, Production Manager at Kaakon Viestintä explains why DCOS was the selected partner for this project; “It has been a quite long process for us to evaluate the different options on the market and our project team have put a lot of effort into this. We visited three DCOS installations, all of them on fairly old presses, all different press types. Besides inspection system we also saw a complete Honeywell retrofit and a partial Honeywell retrofit. It was simply very impressive based on our needs.”

The DCOS camera technology which will be installed on the press includes, ten CRC4 density and color register cameras, and eighteen PTC4 cut-off cameras. The Honeywell control system will be partly retrofitted and all quality functions will be taken over and be controlled by DCOS, including the spray dampening system.

“As in any investment these days the ROI is a key factor that requires in depth analysis. The reference sites we visited were very helpful with results and feedback. They were also very convincing in their experience and satisfaction of being a DCOS customer. This gave us confidence that we found a company for a long-term cooperation and that put the customer’s interests and needs in focus.”, says Lasse Palminen, Chief Information Officer at Kaakon Viestintä.

The installation started mid-March and the system was fully commissioned and in production in May and already serves it purpose well. After 3 weeks in operation the average start-up waste has been reduced to 50% of the original waste and itis expected to continue to decrease in the next months.

“Kaakon Viestintä has gone through some changes over the last year, merging three print shops into one centralized facility. We are very proud to be part of their future and success. This project perfectly symbolizes our capabilities of providing complete automation solutions for printing presses, combining Retrofit with Productivity upgrades”, says Mattias Andersson, CEO at DCOS Sweden AB.

About DCOS
DCOS offers custom-designed automated solutions with a focus on user-friendliness, efficiency and reliability – the aim is to maximize the productivity of the customers.

DCOS offers a new approach in operation and control systems, operator interfaces, production followup and camera-based inspection systems for new and printing press installations, including retrofitting of existing ones. The company has printing press customers across the world and operates a strong service organization based on a network of carefully selected and skilled agents and partners.

(http://www.dcos.se)