Westmont, Illinois -- MAN Roland’s exhibit at Graph Expo offered visitors VIP excursions to the company’s Graphic/Training Center here, enabling them to experience personal demonstrations of additional technology. Over 50 show goers took advantage of the special tours, which were conducted every Graph Expo morning. Each participant was whisked from his hotel by a limo to MAN Roland’s North American headquarters, where a continental breakfast was served. A MAN Roland representative accompanied each visitor every step of the way, providing commentary and answering questions. "You can’t really replicate the one-to-one experience a personal demo provides on the show floor of a busy exhibit," says Christian Cerfontaine, Director of Marketing, MAN Roland Inc. "That’s why we got such positive feedback from the printers who visited our Graph Training Center during Graph Expo." Two demonstration tracks were offered. One focused on the MAN Roland 300, the industry’s only three-quarter-size press that provides perfecting as standard equipment. The second keyed on the Roland 700, the world’s most automated 41-inch press. Both tours featured the production of a GATF test form, a job that’s designed to reveal any weaknesses in the performance of a press, while showing off the equipment’s quality capabilities. The 300 also printed a perfecting project, while the 700 produced high-end posters. The ease with which the presses switched from one job to another was emphasized, as was their automated plate loading capabilities. MAN Roland’s newest PECOM control modules, JobPilot and PressMonitor, also showed off their makeready-reducing skills. JobPilot allows a press to be set up for the next job while the current project prints. PressMonitor tracks and records virtually every action of production so that printers can manage their workflows more precisely and effectively. Both innovations recently received a 2002 InterTech Award from GATF. "Visitors to our Graph Expo exhibit could also see the Westmont presses in action on the PECOM workstations that we linked to the 300 and 700, utilizing JobPilot’s and PressMonitor’s remote capabilities," Cerfontaine notes. "But I think those who toured our Graphic Center had a more memorable experience, because they were able to literally get on the presses while they were running. And they saw how the equipment handled a GATF test form. That’s something you’d never see produced at a trade show." Another plus: The limos got the touring visitors back to the show before noon, so they didn’t miss any of the excitement at Graph Expo.