Kinna – The V-TAB group with headquarters in Göteborg, Sweden, is a major player for printed media in Nordic countries. With Newspapers, Inserts, Magazines and other Commercial products and a total of four coldest printing plants across in the south of Sweden, newspaper production is their largest business.

In 2010 V-TAB made a large investment in building a new printing facility in Landvetter Sweden. A used manroland Colorman press (originally from Stockholm) was purchased, refurbished and installed, including a press control system Retrofit and a conversion to shaftless by the German company EAE.

In 2016, V-TAB saw the emerging need to address the increasing print quality challenges on its 9-cylinder Colorman satellite units. At the same time V-TAB shuttered its printing plant in Örebro which had three Koenig & Bauer (K&B) Commander satellite towers in good condition.

In the end of March 2017, things became more critical and V-TAB reached out to DCOS and asked for urgent assistance in their retrofit project. The first K&B tower was mechanically installed and ready for electrical retrofit and installation with the intent to commission in early summer. Question was placed if DCOS could manage the project in the given short time frame.

After two weeks of intensive technical study and negotiations, the contract was signed and DCOS immediately assigned an engineering team to the project.

“This is the first time we experienced executing a project this size in such short notice. It´s obviously a huge challenge and the close proximity to V-TAB Landvetter was important. Four weeks after the contract signing, we started retrofitting hardware on the tower and another 4 weeks later we were running”, says Mattias Andersson, managing director at DCOS.

Since the project began in April 2017 two identical towers have been installed, retrofitted and commissioned. In the next weeks the third and last tower will be commissioned. In addition, V-TAB also decided to invest in DCOS Closed-Loop Density, Register and Cut-off control for the three K&B Satellite towers.

Dan Eriksson, Project Manager V-TAB, added; “Getting DCOS involved in our project turned into a huge success for us, not only did they help us keep our critical schedule in place, but they also brought our level of automation to a higher standard, with a full scale closed-loop system. We had a worry that two different control and operator systems on a single press could cause challenges for the operators, but the way DCOS implemented their system made this transition easy, and our operators are very pleased with the solution.”

The left most Manroland Colorman satellites are replaced with Koenig & Bauer Commander satellites.

The final press layout is six Manroland Colorman satellite towers, three K&B Commander satellite towers, two Manroland folders and one K&B folder.