Kinna – With the mountains and wilderness in the north, and the major cities and famous East and West coasts in the south, Sweden is Europe’s fifth largest country in area, and stretches over 1500km in longitude. MittMedia Print (MMP) with a total of five printing facilities, is the dominating newspaper producer in the Swedish midlands, encompassing nearly one third of the length of Sweden. MMP is the production division of Mittmedia Group, a media producer with almost 30 daily newspapers, free newspapers, online media and apps.

MMP has a mix of press equipment across their plants, ranging from older KBA and Solna presses, to an ultra-modern KBA Cortina hybrid press. One of the presses, an 11 tower Goss Magnum located in Örnsköldsvik, was silenced in January this year when the print contract with two of Sweden´s largest evening tabloids expired. Since the remaining products could be printed on the Cortina press, the Goss press originally commissioned in 2000 was no longer needed.

At the same time, Mittmedia needed to address the expiring lease situation at a printshop located in a downtown area of Gävle. The conclusion was to close the Gävle plant, move, reconfigure and modernize the press from Örnsköldsvik, and expand a new highly efficient print facility next door to the existing MMP plant in Falun. Centralizing two print shops would create logistic benefits and improve resource utilization.

DCOS was awarded the contract to move, reconfigure and upgrade the drive and control system, including a new closed-loop density, register and cut-off control system.

Jan Andersson CEO of MMP explains why DCOS was picked; “It´s always a benefit to have one partner capable of carrying out all aspects of a project but in this case the topmost priority for us was to get a high-efficiency printing press based on the closed-loop upgrades. DCOS demonstrated a couple of installations with 10-20 years old presses like ours that preformed in line with a new press and this is simply what we need. High automation and low manning. This was decisive for our decision making.”

The new press configuration will be ten towers and one folder. DCOS, together with its sister company Tensor, will carry out the dismantling, reconfiguration, reinstallation and commissioning. The drive and control system will be retrofitted and modernized. Other existing stand-alone systems will be fully integrated to the new press control-system. The existing QTI register system will be replaced by twenty CRC4 closed-loop density, register and fan-out cameras. The folder will be equipped with ten PCT4 cut-off cameras.

Dismantling started in August, and the press shall be completely moved, reconfigured, retrofitted and upgraded by January 2019. This will become the largest closed-loop density installation in Sweden.

“We are very pleased and excited about winning this project and partnering with MMP. Overall this is one of the largest projects in DCOS history, allowing us to combine our broad range of competences, resulting in a complete modernization of their 20-year-old press. This is what we like doing!”, says Mattias Andersson CEO DCOS Sweden AB.

At contract signing, from left; Peter Lindberg MMP, Mattias Andersson DCOS, Jan Andersson MMP, Kenneth Jansson MMP.