How many consoles does it take to drive a 12-tower Colorman newspaper press? What if we told you two, or even one smart desk and a somewhat smaller team of press operators would be ample.

This is no theoretical exercise, but the basis of a project for Belgian-Netherlands printer De Persgroep aimed at reducing cost per copy in a forward-looking plan making the greatest use of current automation technologies.

The four-folder 12-tower manroland press at De Persgroep in Amsterdam will be familiar to those who were among the 160 guests taken by QI Press Controls on three canals boats, to see its automated colour control system during the 2014 Ifra World Publishing Expo.

Now QI and its sister company EAE has won the contract to take the project "to the next level". And this time, the tired cliché really means something, with two of EAE's new Desk 7 consoles and a couple of tablets set to take over the task previously shared across 12 consoles.

The two won the contract after a two-stage process which saw them compete against most of the world's major press automation and colour control companies, and includes retrofitting the existing Honeywell controls, upgrading drives and installing reel automation and cloud-based statistics/reporting systems for both the existing QI system and the new EAE one.

The QI Press Controls IDS colour control system which Ifra visitors saw three years ago also gets an update, with the company's new 3D cameras and latest software innovations. Among new features are "smart presetting" which allows a 'colour OK' copy at start-up, and a plate swap detection system within 250 revolutions, removing the need for manual content checks.

"The whole press will operated from two of our EAE Desk 7 consoles, something which has never been achieved in the world before," chairman Menno Jansen told GXpress Magazine. "We will physically deliver just two desks in a worldwide premier allowing a reduction in manning."

In the case of the Amsterdam press, four printers will be needed instead of six previously.

Part of the brief is that the customer should be able to make adjustments, solve problems and to add functionalities, and an invaluable tool here will be a new 'EAE Desk 7 tablet' with which De Persgroep staff can operate, trouble-shoot and maintain the press from any location inside the print shop.

"The operator no longer needs to stand at his desk in order to monitor the process," says Jansen. "He now has the possibility to do that from any location, allowing him to multitask, and meaning lower manning is possible."

The Amsterdam print facility has been owned by media group De Persgroep since 2009, and is one of five plants in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark (four of which have QI or EAE systems).

The company has national newspapers including the Netherlands' second (Algemeen Dagblad) and third largest (Volkskrant), and Amsterdam's largest local newspaper Het Parool, as well as radio and TV interests. The 2015 acquisitions of Wegener and Berlingske make them Belgium's second-largest publisher, the Netherlands' largest and number three in Denmark.

Jansen says the project began soon after QI - which had been working with De Persgroep since 2011 - acquired EAE in 2014.

"They have been like a partner to us, and we have been visiting them with potential clients and successful in selling our solutions globally because of that," he says. "Their input into our planned new EAE control platform has been fundamental, and from the start has included the possibility to control multiple folders with just one desk.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: A schematic of the press with its 12 nine-cylinder satellites and four folders; part of the press; and the EAE Desk 7