Recently, the first of two manroland 32-page COLORMAN presses went into production at Neue Osnabrucker Zeitung, the publishing house of one of Germany’s elite daily newspapers.  manroland completed installation of one of the most modern and automated presses currently available on the market in an extremely short time period.  It provides a preview of what North   American publishers can expect when they move forward with autoprint.

One of the main criteria that persuaded the German newspaper to make the decision was the advantages of manroland’s Automatic Plate Loading (APL) system.  It reduces plate change-over times to three minutes for the entire system, which presents a convincing argument with 2,200 plate changes throughout each production day.

“The APL was an important criterion for our investment in the new COLORMAN press, “said Hermann Eistermann, publisher of Neue Osnabrucker Zeitung.  “It gained efficiency, but it also shortened make-ready times to allow more capacity to contract print other newspapers as well.  This helps us spread labor costs over more production.”

Newspaper printers constantly increase automation and change-over times keep getting shorter because modern newspaper printing must comply with many different demands today.  Versioning, increased color needs, and shorter deadline times are just a few items newspapers must resolve.  Ron Sams, manroland VP – Newspaper Sales, believes autoprint will help settle many of these issues.

“The manroland autoprint / one touch vision for automation is a perfect fit for the new production paradigm facing newspaper print consolidators and newspaper  hybrid printers,” Sams said.  “The current trend of newspaper consolidation in the U.S. will drive the successful consolidators to optimize their production capacity and workflow in a manner similar to successful commercial printers.  The new business model for them depends on the ability to schedule, track and manufacture printing jobs with minimal waste, labor, make-ready and change-over, all at the lowest cost.”

“The other automation modules are of great importance,” continued Eistermann.  “For example, the automatic cutoff register control CutCon and the QuickStart  function help ensure an errorless process.  manroland has led a pioneering role by meeting the needs of the market with some remarkable features.”