Regional daily the Frankfurter Rundschau was the first newspaper published in US-occupied Germany after the end of World War II and only the second after the war. Today, the privately-owned publisher – controlled by Cologne-based M. DuMont Schauberg – has become a significant contract printer, with German giant Axel Springer as a substantial client.

I visited its Neu-Isenburg printing plant during World Publishing Expo as a guest of EAE, whose colour density control system was installed at the site last year.

The plant has been upgraded several times since its establishment in 1973, with a shaftless 16-unit KBA Commander press with four double and two single folders installed in 1998. It prints eight daily, eight weekly and 34 periodical publications totalling eight million copies a week – of which 6.2 million is contract work – at up to 160,000cph (40,000rph). Included is not only the 120,000 daily Rundschau but rivals such as the local Bild edition and Handselblatt.

Start-ups are smooth and stress-free, with good copies produced almost immediately using prepress preset data.

Krause CTP was installed in 2006 with Nela punching and automatic plate sorting, and a VIP monitoring and archiving system added the following year. RIP and ink optimisation software comes from Agfa, and the plant splits between Fuji and Agfa low-chemistry plates.

In the Ferag mailroom six drum inserting lines handle up to six inserts each, a total of 1.2 million inserts a day. An interesting component here is Videojet inkjet addressing, used to personalise 20,000 copies a day which then go into the postal system.

Provision for the EAE colour system – with a link to dampening systems due for completion next month – was part of a substantial press upgrade in 2010 which included a change to a narrower web width.

Apart from reproducible colour, the aim was to reduce staff and free up capacity to take on more commercial work. Plant manager Denis Kämper says the company had a team of 57, “all good printers but all with different colour perception,” he jokes. Stability since has been “astonishing”… no comparison with production before the upgrade.

An agreement with the works council not to refill vacancies laid the basis for plans to reduce manning by 15 per cent and when this was achieved by the end of last year, Kämper knew he was on track for a return on investment – excluding waste reduction and increased colour use – within three years and “well within the life of the press”.

Preparation and changeover times have also been reduced, with ISO quality reached at under 2000 copies. Kämper says the ‘loop’ system takes about 200 cylinder revolutions to identify a faulty plate.

An EAE-developed soft-proofing system installed at all consoles at the instigation of Axel Springer is not typically used in production. And while presses may be manned with three to five operators “to ensure a quick changeover”, they are able to run with one or two.

Peter Coleman (from GXpress Magazine November 2012)