➤ Newspapers – with their variety of inserts and supplements – are increasingly created in the mailroom, and a new ferag system at West Australian Newspapers is demonstrating the benefits which can be achieved. Increased production capacity, new and enhanced products, and earlier newsagent deliveries are part of the story ... but so are the business opportunities which have come from the mailroom technology. The three-drum ferag system at WAN’s print site in Osborne Park, Perth, is part of a $200 million upgrade which included heatset and coldset KBA presses and Kodak CTP for the flagship ‘West Australian’ newspaper – which rises up to more than 700 tabloid pages and a circulation of 385,000 at weekends – and other work including glossy magazines. Installation of the ferag system went hand-in-hand with that of the presses, which included 24 towers and six folders as well as automated reel handling, and had to integrate with use of the existing Goss equipment. And with multimillion-dollar savings now flowing from the ambitious development, the mailroom systems vendor gets a big ‘tick’ from print centre general manager Ross Booth, “not only for the end result of the upgrade, but for the manner in which they went about delivering the result”. Four existing inserting systems, which had been installed in 1987, were removed as each of the three new systems were installed and commissioned. Additionally, a matrix switch delivers the flexibility of allowing output from any folder to go to any system, or to an additional winder or one of the two commercial stackers. Booth says the project has been “an unqualified success”. “There were no unplanned interruptions to production as the new equipment was first integrated with the old Goss presses, and then moved across to the new high-speed KBA line,” he says. Flexibility is a key element in the hybrid pressline which combines double-width KBA Colora presses which print at 75,000 cph with heatset and coldset single-width Comet capacity, and features two bridges which allow webs to be carried from one line to the other. Replacement winding and inserting equipment and the matrix switch have substantially increased publishing capacity at the plant, in terms of processing speed and volume. “This coupled with the speed of the KBA equipment, has had a very positive impact on the departure times of our distribution truck network, with the flow-on benefit to our distribution agents of earlier papers both Monday to Friday and on Saturday mornings,” he says. “The maximum single issue we have delivered so far exceeded 560 pages, the theoretical maximum size product the distribution agents can roll for home delivery.” Two ferag SNT42 inline trimmers, with additional winders and a MemoStick system to place advertising notes on newspapers and magazines, are among the facilities which have added new marketing and production opportunities for WAN. “Trimming in particular has allowed us to heavily modify our product offering,” says Ross Booth. “We now print and trim two heatset magazines each week, as well as the ‘New Homes’ and ‘Travel’ sections of Saturday editions, and a range of one-off feature magazines, generally coldset, are printed throughout the week. These are delivering positive readership feedback and advertising results.” Booth says being able to produce a wide range of trimmed product shapes and sizes has clear appeal to both the advertising and editorial departments. “Our success so far has us working with ferag to review options which will allow us increase our production and trimming capacity, hopefully during the first quarter of 2009.” FERAG AUSTRALIA Sydney – Ph: (02) 8337 9777 Melbourne – Ph: (03) 9551 3988 www.ferag-australia.com