TechNews Goes to College Point
by Clark Robinson
Editor's note: During 1998, TechNews will tour six state-of-the-art printing facilities throughout the United States-one per each bimonthly issue. Our goal is to give you the feeling that you are taking the tour with us, a sense of "being there." We also hope to provide as much information as possible on these plants and the people and technical decisions that went into building them. We begin with a tour of The New York Times' new College Point facility.
My first view of College Point comes from the back of a taxi cab driving 60 miles an hour along the Whitestone Expressway in Queens. I am immediately struck by the style of the building's exterior-corrugated metal emblazoned with the paper's famous masthead, whose type is set at an angle and runs off the ends of the walls. The first wall says "imes," and the front says, "e New York Time." The paper confidently expects all passers-by to fill in the blanks. The corrugated metal and whimsical type are punctuated by geometric shapes in bright, primary colors.
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Two views of the exterior of The New York Times' $315 million College Point facility |
"I haven't been to this area since The Times took it over," says the cab driver. "Wow, they really did a nice job with it. This place used to be a swamp, and there was trash everywhere. Then the police used it as a lot to impound stolen cars. My brother-in-law's a cop, and he used to work there."
After going through security, the cabbie drops me at the front of the walkway leading to the visitor's entrance. The path is made of black and white cement squares laid out like a Times crossword puzzle. As I walk toward the entrance, I see my reflection in the angled, three-story-tall glass windows.
Vice President of Production David A. Thurm greets me. I'm a half-hour early, so Thurm asks me to wait in a conference room and gives me a copy of today's Times. Two sheets from a large US Ink calendar are visible on the far wall: December 1997 and January 1998. November 1997 sits crumpled on an office chair. Along the near wall are a number of training posters from Goss Graphic Systems- "3:2 Folding Couple Operation-Collect Run," "Goss Colorliner Plate Lockup Assembly," etc. At the front of the room is a greaseboard on which someone has written, "In the absence of information, blame is directed."
Thurm re-enters the room and introduces me to Plant Manager Thomas P. Lombardo and Deputy Plant Manager Douglas Rizzi. Thurm does most of the talking. He explains that College Point is the final stage of the Times' 10-year, $750 million capital-equipment improvement program, allowing later deadlines, daily color, daily inserting, better daily sectioning and zoning, and improved quality. College Point, which cost $315 million, and its sister plant in Edison, N.J., replace the old printing facility in the basement of the Times' building on 43rd Street in Manhattan. The ceiling at 43rd Street was not high enough for the five 10-unit Goss Colorliner presses needed to provide color in the daily paper and Sunday's late sections.
Thurm describes College Point as "the most highly automated newspaper facility in North America," and I see nothing during the day that causes me to doubt him. Thurm and Rizzi take turns showing me around the plant; Lombardo receives a call on his cellular phone that causes him to disappear before the tour starts. (Thurm and Rizzi also take calls throughout the tour. The plant has its own cell, Thurm explains, and almost all managers and foremen are always reachable by phone.)
A diagram showing the ASRS (upper left) and other components of the Roll Handling System by HK Systems Inc. |
I am immediately struck by how few people it takes to run this massive plant, and how well those people seem to get along with one another. The esprit de corps is palpable. This stems, no doubt, from the way the plant was designed. Over 300 Times staffers were involved, including the equipment operators, who often came up with the best suggestions. They juggled their schedules and worked double shifts in order to participate in fact-finding missions at advanced plants from outside the newspaper industry: Budweiser, Clairol, Caterpillar and Hanes underwear, to name a few. We pass about a dozen Christmas trees scattered among the presses, inserters and other equipment.
Our first stop is the Automatic Storage and Retrieval System provided by HK Systems Inc. for storing newsprint. Two high-speed, computer-controlled cranes zip back and forth along their tracks, picking and placing newsprint rolls from racks nine stories high. The ASRS works in concert with a Roll Delivery System provided by FMC Corp., which uses 16 automatic-guided vehicles to transport rolls to lift tables at the press reel stands. The two systems can track each roll so precisely, operators can tell you that a roll produced on machine A at mill B is now on reel stand X on press Y. Each roll is untouched by human hands, except when workers take off the end caps at the stripping station and put on the paster pattern.
In the press-control room, Rizzi points to one of the 17 information displays scattered throughout the plant. No matter where you go in the plant, a display is always in view. The workers choose what data to see, which usually include the numbers of good and waste copies.
From here, Rizzi takes me to platemaking. His cell phone rings-it's Thurm, wanting to know where we are. He soon rejoins us and leads us into the packaging area.
The first machines we see comprise the Printroll Storage System by Muller Martini A.G., which automatically stores printed product for insertion. "This is the fourth such system in the world," Thurm says. "Edison has one of the others. It is important to have a buffer system so we don't tie the presses to the stackers." Five printroll carriers dart among 450 printrolls, each of which stores 256,000 pages, like so many bees darting among a row of flowers.
From here, we stop at a PC to view the plant's Setup and Monitoring System. A graphical representation of the plant and all of its equipment is on the screen. "You can see the status of every press," Thurm says, double-clicking on a press icon. "The output from this press is 100 percent in buffer." He clicks back to the main screen. "And here you can see what's going on with stacker 44A."
The Times' own systems department wrote SAM using standard, off-the-shelf software. It can give you a view right down to a programmable logic controller within College Point, and can even give you a view of what's happening at Edison. Thurm, who may be the most wired production VP in the country, can view either plant from a computer in his home.
We walk further into packaging, past eight GMA SLS2000 inserters, one of which (says the information display) is running at 17,000 copies per hour. Four of the inserters are 6:1, expandable to 8:1; and four are 10:1, expandable to 12:1.
Twenty-nine bundle tielines include roller-top conveyors by Machine Design Service Inc., stackers by Quipp Systems Inc., and strappers by Dynaric Inc. Thirteen tielines support the five presses; a cell of five tielines supports two presses-two per press with a shared backup. "No stacker should ever stop a press," says Thurm, repeating the theme he started at the Printroll Storage System. Sixteen tielines support the eight SLS2000 inserters.
At this point, we follow tied bundles into the Bundle Distribution System. Provided by Machine Design Service with control software by the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute, the two-tiered tray system uses linear induction motors and is remarkably quiet. In addition to delivering bundles from the tielines to eight palletizers, the system also accumulates bundles as a buffer for the palletizers.
Printroll Storage System by Muller Martini |
A forklift operator carries a wrapped pallet to the highest-priority truck. |
The palletizers are provided by a company formerly known as Western Atlas Inc., now part of HK Systems. The belts leading into the palletizers only move when needed, and the one we're watching is moving quite slowly indeed. "A watched palletizer never wraps," says Thurm. The intermittent motion cuts down on both noise and wear and tear, he explains. I ask about a worker who is monitoring the palletizers. His job, Rizzi explains, is mainly to clear bundle jams.
Finally, our palletizer whirs into action, building a pallet five levels deep. Once the pallet is fully loaded, the same palletizer spins an integrated roll of strech-wrap around the bundles, and the wrapped pallet drops to the floor leading to the loading docks.
A forklift operator cruises up to the pallet and whisks it away to one of the docks. "At 43rd Street, this guy used to throw papers onto trucks," says Thurm, "Now he's a forklift operator." The palletizers are always building for the highest-priority truck, Thurm explains, and the pallet and truck-loading information are sent to the forklift operator electronically. As a backup, the same information is printed on the pallet's label.
My cab driver for the ride back to LaGuardia doesn't speak much English, so our conversation is sparse. It's too bad, as I am eager to tell someone how The New York Times has pulled off three modern miracles: It designed and built a thoroughly integrated and automated printing plant, cleaned up a swampy, trash-strewn section of Queens, and kept its workers happy in the process.
Clark Robinson is the editor of TechNews. E-mail, robic@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1686; fax, (703) 902-1690.