Mafra is one of the major media companies in the Czech Republic, serving all channels – print, online, television and radio. Mafra regularly reaches around 2.4 million readers via printed newspapers: its highest-circulation titles are the daily Mladá fronta DNES, Lidové noviny and Metro. The weekly 5plus2 appears every Friday with a circulation of over 800,000 copies. Mafra is an arm of Agrofert, one of the country’s largest industrial groups and especially active in the chemical and food industries.

The media group’s two printing plants in Prague and Olomouc together operate a total of seven production lines centred around Koenig & Bauer Colora web offset presses and Ferag postpress technology. Each press has an output of 37,500 copies per hour and can produce 48 pages in Berliner (“midi”) format or 96 pages of tabloid. Altogether they process around 30,000 tonnes of paper each year. As both locations operate with identical technology and are ideally positioned in geographical terms, conditions are good for sales coverage both nationwide and in neighbouring countries. And that also means favourable prospects for taking in external orders.

More capacity required
Exactly these orders increasingly necessitated bindery processing, especially three-sided trimming. And so, in 2015, Mafraprint equipped its printing plants with Ferag SNT-35 trimming drums. Integrated directly into the production lines, they are able to continuously trim the product from three sides at once. Following on from the trimming drums, Mafraprint’s next logical step was to invest in “classic” linear gatherer-stitchers. These opened up the market for magazines but quickly reached their limits due to speed restrictions.

Mafraprint CEO Michal Tamchyna: “A newsprint supplement with a cover on coated paper was well received by customers and soon we reached our capacity limit. That full capacity utilization led to concerns: there was no reserve left – neither in the event of a malfunction nor for special orders. For this reason, we initiated a selection procedure and included the new equipment in our 2017 investment plan. All told, the decision took us less than six months. At the end of 2016, our parent company Agrofert a.s. approved the investment plan and in the first quarter of 2017 we signed the contract with Ferag. Delivery and commissioning were completed during the autumn without any problems. Following Ferag’s recommendation, we implemented training and commissioning in two phases. Despite increased costs for the second round, this indeed proved to be a good decision.”

In-house job provides the base load
The new UDR2-350-ZF6 UniDrum now enables collating and stitching at significantly higher speed and has tripled stitching capacity at Mafraprint in Prague. The UniDrum is currently equipped with three JetFeeders, although three more could be retrofitted if necessary. The move to UniDrum at the Prague location was made easier by an existing in-house job, namely the different magazine-like supplements included with each day’s DNES newspaper. Producing these supplements used to require a very complex workflow involving external partners, and this could be markedly simplified thanks to the new Ferag technology.

Mafraprint CEO Michal Tamchyna: “Despite the fact that this in-house use case could not initially guarantee the targeted utilization of the trimming / stitching drum, the investment boosted production reliability and ensured shorter production times for the company’s own insert products, as well as reducing their cost. However, because the UniDrum is the only piece of processing equipment of its kind in the region, within a few months it was possible to achieve the planned capacity utilization through external jobs.” This fulfilled Mafraprint’s ambitious goals, which are calculated first and foremost on very short ROI periods.

Orders from external customers – publishing houses, city administrations and retail chains among them – are already utilizing over half of Mafraprint’s total capacity. Due to this successful market expansion, Mafraprint plans as early as this autumn to supplement the UniDrum with a UniCover 40 cover hopper and MultiDisc for product unwinding. This should also lead to a further increase in speed, from 28,000 at present to around 35,000 copies per hour.

Qualitative leap forward
Michal Tamchyna: “The new gathering-stitching technology represents a qualitative leap forward not only for the printing plant but also for the publishing house.” According to Tamchyna, moving to this new technology required additional qualification of the operators – also when it came to maintenance. The planned deadlines and parameters were met thanks to the support of WRH Global Czech, Ferag’s Czech representative. For this reason Michal Tamchyna rates the cooperation with Ferag and WRH Global as “in the long view, very positive”.

(http://www.ferag.com)