A team of experienced manroland German-based engineers worked tirelessly over a two-year period to complete a thorough upgrade and overhaul of Thairath Daily's six GEOMAN presses under the largest service contract up to now which was signed during drupa 2008. Thairath Daily is the largest newspaper in Thailand.

The complex task was to replace and retrofit the complete press controls including the MEGTEC reelstand controls. All presses including reelstands are now equipped with the same new and powerful PECOM controls. So production safety and press reliability are fixed for the future. In addition, more efficiency for production has been realized. Besides a mechanical upgrade, a register guidance system MultiCam from QuadTech has been installed. The additional benefits include the reduction in makeready times, waste rates, as well as the production and maintenance costs. All of these upgrades have been done with minimal interruption to the production operation of Thairath Daily, the Bangkok-based newspaper, so that they could meet a circulation of more than one million copies daily even during the upgrade period.

The GEOMAN advanced upgrade follows Thairath's transition to digitalized technology in 2007 in the prepress area with the help of ppi Media, a manroland subsidiary, and as part of the manroland printnet workflow solutions. The latest technology and modern backup systems make a pressline more reliable, which safeguards the production. Spare parts are readily available for ten years and more and production processes can be diagnosed better and evaluated faster. TeleSupport and local support from manroland can reach all automation and control areas in case of necessity and all is out-of-one-hand. After the upgrade the presslines are operated with the latest standard in press control equipment, such as Ethernet technology-based communication and the ClosedLoop features, such as register and cut-off controls, as well as the advanced diagnostic system among others. Strictly adhering to the agreed project schedule, the whole project has been skillfully managed and successfully completed by a competent responsible project team from Thairath and manroland. For the long-term perspective of Thairath, manroland upgraded not only the printing hardware capacities of Thairath but also the printing knowledge of their staff.