Control electronics and other mailroom components have been updated in a major project at RCS Group in Milan.

Rizzoli Corriere della Sera - one of Italy's largest media groups, producing titles including Corriere della Sera and the pink Gazzetta dello Sport daily - has turned attention to technology in its Pessano, Padua and Rome mailrooms, installed 12-15 years ago.

Largest of these is Pessano, in northern Milan, while Italy's northeast is served from Paduaand the capital and its suburbs from Rome, and all were reequipped for a format change involving bundle formation, topsheet production and conveyor segments up to the loading ramp, and repeated control hardware upgrades have followed.

A schedule for comprehensive new control technology was set in 2017. , an exact schedule was defined for retrofitting the production lines to differing degrees.
Pessano, for example, uses six folder deliveries, with four lines used for Corriere della Sera leading to total of six MTS stackers, while two newer paced conveyor lines for Gazzetta dello Sport have three of the stackers each. Here, two lines have not been and two others had PRA-PC control units upgraded to PRA+ with new control over topsheet production and inkjet addressing.

For the two latest lines, however - which also have separate bundle dispatch - both LIM line controls and old Dispatchmaster bundle conveyor line controls were upgraded to PKT2 standard, and the MDS data server and superordinate IDS system were also replaced.

Ferag project manager Kurt Mettler says the biggest challenge was to ensure that bundle formation and dispatch would keep on going at every stage of the conversion. "This was a massive effort in terms of the amount of rewiring alone, with all the pusher modules replaced as well," he says.

By converting some of the mailroom lines, RCS has also increased its spare parts inventory. The five-month project was "effortless and without disruption to daily production".