New Tools for the Mailroom

As insert volumes continue to increase, a complete mailroom solution remains elusive. But seven new point solutions may become key pieces of the overall puzzle.

by Andrew Bowser

The packaging department faces increasing pressure from two sides: Insert volume is going up, while advertisers want to target their inserts to ever-finer zones. Many newspapers are finding it hard to keep up. They don’t have sufficient equipment capacity or storage space, and labor costs continue to rise.

The Holy Grail is an integrated, highly automated, packaging-production system that is both fast and flexible. As we won’t be seeing that animal any time soon, newspapers must settle for incremental improvements in the various discrete packaging functions.

In this article, TechNews highlights seven cutting-edge products that, in piecemeal fashion, are addressing some of the challenges facing mailrooms today. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor is it an attempt to single out the seven top new products on the market. But keep an eye on these disparate tools–they could represent key parts of a total mailroom solution in the coming decade.

Uncoupling the Press

In the mailroom, speed–or more specifically, the lack thereof–kills. That’s especially true as new high-speed presses, often capable of cranking out 70,000 or even 80,000 copies per hour, come online, threatening to suffocate far pokier post-press operations.

Not at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, which recently opened a state-of-the-art production facility (TechNews, January/February 2000, p. 22). A key component of its 100,000-square-foot mailroom is Heidelberg Web Systems’ NP363 Line Storage System. The fully automated system stores both newspaper sections and inserts online. When they are needed, the NP363 acts like a virtual printing press, serving sections and inserts back into the mailroom workflow.

"This system allows for complete uncoupling of the press and mailroom operations," says Dave Wineman, technical-sales specialist for Heidelberg Web Systems of Dover, N.H. "Product can flow directly into storage instead of going to the mailroom."

The line-storage system is fed by a gripper conveyor at speeds of up to 80,000 copies per hour. Sections or inserts come directly from the press, eliminating the need for pallets, forklifts, warehousing, and manual offline storage and retrieval. Products are stored on extruded aluminum shelves as a lapped stream, just as they come off the press. The modular system’s preprint-storage cell can hold 340,000 broadsheet pages–enough for an entire Sunday run.

Dayton’s new mailroom equipment marks "the beginning of our ability to be more flexible with our total distribution system," says Stan Richmond, vice president of operations.

The NP363 also can serve as an overflow buffer–if there’s a problem with an inserter, for instance. In Dayton, two hours of full-speed press production can be stored in three overflow-buffer cells. By providing an alternate product stream to the inserter, it also can be used for selective sectioning.

The system is not, however, a perfect solution for everyone, notes NAA Post-Press Manager Harshad Matalia. It does not come cheap, takes up a lot of space, and is one more piece of equipment that must be maintained. "You have to weigh this against the flexibility you will get and the time you will save, and also the waste that is minimized," he says.

Dayton represents the first U.S. installation of this equipment, though similar systems have been in place for up to a decade in Finland, Malaysia and Hong Kong. And other U.S. papers have similar offline-storage initiatives–notably, the drum- and print-wheel systems made by other manufacturers.

Chuck Blevins, a Vienna, Va.-based consultant on the Dayton project, says the NP363 was selected over rolling-wheel systems because of the need to store already-inserted newspaper sections. Otherwise, "any of the systems becomes a candidate," he says.

Zipping Through Zone Changes

Zoning involves some pretty simple math: Take the number of part-run inserts and compare it to the number of hoppers on the inserting equipment, and pretty soon you’ve got an equation involving downtime for changeovers.

New inserters, however, promise to shift the balance. Consider Heidelberg’s NP1280 Packaging System, which can include as many as 80 hoppers, compared with the 30 or 35 on a typical inserter.

"[The] main purpose is to greatly increase productivity in an era when increased zoning requirements have been affecting productivity pretty heavily," says Heidelberg technical-sales specialist Peter Tassinari.

The additional hoppers allow the system to better handle zone changes. "While the machinery keeps running, you are able to switch other hoppers over to new inserts that will come on for a later zone," Tassinari explains. "You never have to shut the machine down in order to take some product out of one hopper and put more product into another hopper."

Driven by independent, precision servomotors, the NP1280 is the first shaftless inserter on the market. Built into the design are various maintenance-saving features, including sealed bearings that do not require lubrication. The NP1280 has a circulinear design, allowing for placement around support columns.

The system is now being tested at one newspaper site, which can’t discuss the product due to a confidentiality agreement. Originally scheduled to be available in January, rollout has been pushed back at least four months to iron out issues with the control system.

Blevins calls the NP1280 packaging system "an indication of the future direction of equipment design. It’s extremely flexible in how it can be configured, which will be a big advantage, particularly going into existing locations."

Dayton considered an NP1280 for its new plant, but the inserter couldn’t be made available in time, according to Blevins. Tucson Newspapers Inc. intends to purchase one should it meet initial expectations, says Wayne Bean, vice president of operations.

"I like the modular design, and the fact that I can grow it as long as I want it," says Bean, who plans to start out with 34 hoppers.

The Space Race

Heavy metal leaves large footprints. And with more and more inserts coming into mailrooms, physical space is becoming a prized commodity.

One early candidate in the space race is the Bundler, touted by GMA Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., as a single device replacing the three or four machines now used to stack, bundle and tie papers. Along with space and equipment savings, the Bundler also promises to improve accuracy and quality. After creating a bundle, it adds a bottom sheet, a top sheet, and two parallel straps six inches apart.

"In a traditional operation, when the bundle ejects into a bottom-wrap or tying machine, the inserts tend to skate out of the bundle," says Randy Seidel, GMA’s president and chief executive officer. "In a Bundler, that’s not the case, because we contain them at all times."

Slated for mid-2000 release, the system was beta-tested at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., where it handled up to nine inserts per paper for a limited number of zones (TechNews, September/ October 1999, p. 34). More intensive testing has continued since August at GMA’s own research-and-development center, which inserts about 1.2 million packages weekly for New York City’s Daily News. Two Bundlers are processing upwards of 30,000 bundles per week, with a typical throughput of 25 bundles per minute. One machine is handling a comic tabloid jacket including as many as 28 pieces–"probably the most difficult product we will be faced with," Seidel says.

The Bundler is servomotor-driven, allowing for fast, accurate movements adjusted for the size of the product. It also automatically obtains data including speed, page count and copies per bundle from inserting and gripping equipment, allowing it to handle odd-count bundles.

Rick Molchany, vice president of operations for The Morning Call, touted the system’s link with both inserting and downstream systems. "The Bundler speaks the same language, which helps push us...toward more targeted marketing, and smaller and smaller selling."

As for the space race, the Bundler claims about one-third of the space needed for standard bundling equipment, according to Seidel.

Servo-Powered Strapping

Inserters may be getting smarter and faster, but all that innovation goes to waste if downstream equipment brings production to a screeching halt. Perhaps no other downstream category has seen more improvements in speed and reliability of late than strapping.

Consider the Strapmaster NS from Ovalstrapping Inc. of Fort Payne, Ala., which uses servomotors to reach speeds of 45 bundles per minute and includes such maintenance-minimizing features as a self-lubricating sealing head and sealed bearings. On-board diagnostics, including plain-English readouts and printable event logs, also reduce troubleshooting time.

Servomotors feed and tension the strap, control conveyor starts and stops, and rotate the seal head. In addition to enabling higher throughput, servos eliminate the need for typically high-wear parts such as clutches, brakes, solenoids and limit switches. For instance, they can be programmed to feed the strap very quickly at the beginning of the cycle and slow it down near the end, increasing speed and preventing damage to the strapping material.

"Newspapers have to get out the door on time, and mailrooms, like most businesses, are pinched with labor costs," says Morgan Stout, Ovalstrapping’s sales and marketing manager. "This machine addresses both of those concerns. It’s a reliable piece of equipment that requires a minimal amount of maintenance."

First introduced in 1997, Strapmasters are designed for high-end, high-production mailrooms–and are priced accordingly. But they’ve also been sold to 20,000-to-60,000-circulation newspapers. To date, more than 25 publishers, including The Denver Post, Dow Jones & Co., Tucson Newspapers and The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., have installed one or more Strapmasters (one, in fact, has installed 12).

"We have gone over 10,000 ties without a fault," says Bean of Tucson Newspapers, which now uses four Strapmasters. "Even [when] the seal heads are completely covered with dust, the machine does not skip a beat."

Bean particularly likes the fact that Strapmaster conveyors can be adjusted to accommodate odd-size or football-shaped bundles, and that the machine can sense small bundles and determine whether bundle compression is necessary. Virtually no maintenance has been needed, though Bean acknowledges that operating the system requires a "more highly skilled electronic technician," a drawback common to most newer equipment.

After Tucson Newspapers noted an overheating problem with the accumulator motor-starter overloads, Ovalstrapping changed the electrical-panel layout and obtained a motor starter from another supplier to resolve the problem. "This is not something we have experienced with other manufacturers," Bean says.

Control Through Collation

Always a rough process, inserting is made more difficult by increasing volume, which strains the newspaper as it thickens and makes it more likely the next insert will be deflected and stick out.

Collation, by contrast, offers more control and produces a fairly flat stack. "I don’t doubt there will be a bit of a trend towards that, because that’s what the commercial [printing] folks do," says Blevins.

One approach to collation involves the 3G Series Collating Line by Prim Hall Enterprises Inc., which handles up to 300 copies per minute. The Plattsburgh, N.Y., supplier is currently producing a 72-hopper, 220-foot-long collator for The Washington Post. Expected to enter production by August, the Post installation represents Prim Hall’s largest collator to date; the next largest was for a commercial bindery. Another newspaper has discussed a 100-hopper machine with Prim Hall, though no order has been placed.

"We are in the process of installing and testing it right now, so I don’t know if the verdict’s in yet," says Roy Weeks, the Post’s manager of post-press electronics. "But there are some very different features."

Like other new mailroom equipment, the collator uses servo technology. In this case, Prim Hall developed a servo-drive system for the separator disc on each hopper, extending the length of the product the hopper can run. Calipers added to the system can count deviations as small as two-thousandths of an inch. The calipers are nondefeatable; they have to be set or the machine will not function.

"We anticipate increasing their productivity by 50 percent," says John E. Prim, president of Prim Hall.

The Post, which has three other collators, ordered the Prim Hall system in hopes that it would allow the newspaper to offer advertisers later deadlines. As things stand, preprints must now be received 10 days in advance.

This will be the Post’s first Prim Hall collator, though the supplier has provided hoppers and hopper loaders for the Post’s existing collators, and outfitted hoppers with calipers to detect insert misses and multiples (TechNews, January/February 1998, p. 22).

With its 72-hopper collator, the Post’s new system could place every insert in a single run. The Post typically would not put 72 inserts in one paper, but when zones overlap, the collator could eliminate the traditional hassle of substituting one insert for another in a hopper.

The control unit knows what inserts are in each hopper; for a given zone, it automatically selects which hoppers to turn on and off. Near the end of the run, lights flash to signal the need for manual adjustments. Otherwise, the collator finishes one zone and automatically starts the next. And that’s the system’s true benefit, according to Prim.

"What is really bringing collation processing to the forefront is the number of inserts, the number of zones, and to a large extent, the logistical difficulty in trying to manage all of these," he says.

Oceans Apart

At first blush, European mailrooms seem far faster and more automated than their American counterparts. But then again, they handle only a fraction of the volume. Now some suppliers are seeking to marry the European flair for speed with the American flood of preprints.

"Before, what the Europeans wanted was for the Americans to use their high-speed inserters at a limited inserting capacity," Blevins notes.

While not the highest-speed inserter in existence, the Thorsted A855 Inserting Machine can use up to 30 hoppers at speeds of 35,000 copies per hour.

In an unusual twist, the system collates and inserts preprints into an open jacket all at once, resulting in fewer jams and stops. "On other machines, the jacket is opened underneath all of the feed hoppers, and you insert 30 times," explains Roger S. Miller, vice president of Craftsman Newspaper Production Systems in Tipp City, Ohio, Thorsted’s U.S. distributor.

The A855 also supports tandem operation, allowing the same product to be loaded into two different feed hoppers. That could eliminate the need for several people to continually load one hopper. The feed hopper itself is specially designed to handle smaller products and single sheets.

While there have been no North American installations to date, several A855s have been sold in Germany.

Producing Pallets

With more inserts coming in and more complete packages going out to distribution centers, pallets have become a key mailroom player. The problem is tying the loose ends together.

"We tie our bundles that go to the branches. But when we stack papers that have to be inserted, we don’t want them tied, because we move them on pallets to the insert machine," explains Stan Pantel, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s vice president of operations. So the AJC purchased from Craftsman the only palletizing system available in the United States that can process both tied and untied bundles.

Installed at the papers’ satellite printing plant north of Atlanta, the four Winrob palletizers and associated bundle conveyors have saved "large dollars" by eliminating temporary labor on the dock and automating the stack-off process in the mailroom, Pantel says. "We are picking up about 15-to-30 minutes in unloading time."

The bundle-conveyor system takes responsibility for the product once it exits the tie line. Each section has its own motor, which slowly starts up and stops as needed, gently moving the bundles, either tied or untied, through the conveyor system to the palletizing unit.

While most palletizers build layers one row at a time, the Winrob system accumulates a whole layer of 12 bundles before picking it up and placing it on the pallet, greatly reducing the risk of bumping bundles into one another. Once complete, the pallet is automatically indexed to the wrapper and lowered to the floor, where it can be picked up with a pallet jack–no fork truck is needed.

"The technology was not overly complex, yet it accomplished the very fundamental task of loading and stacking bundles," Pantel says. "We looked at robots, but did not feel they were ready for prime time, and we didn’t like carts, because too much space is required."

While the palletizers remain the system’s centerpiece, conveyors also play a critical role in the AJC mailroom, which is configured so that copies can be transported from any of four press lines to any of four palletizers. Should one palletizer or press be down, copies are automatically diverted and palletizing proceeds as usual.

The next step will be installing a similar system in the AJC’s downtown plant, probably by year’s end. "We think this is a natural step forward in reducing costs for an operation of our size," Pantel says.

The Big Picture

Impressed? Here’s the catch: Throwing together these seven products–or any other cutting-edge packaging systems, for that matter–won’t create a unified mailroom answering all needs for all people. Like pagination and digital printing, and like scores of other newspaper-technology goals, a complete solution remains years away.

Still, these and other improvements offer some hints as to what that future mailroom will look like. It will be incredibly flexible, with automated machinery allowing zone changes on the fly. It will be incredibly fast, allowing complicated inserting operations at press speeds. And it will be tightly integrated, with inserting and downstream systems communicating to keep papers moving to the loading dock and beyond. And many fewer bodies will be required to accomplish it all.

To get there, you can plan to build your automated mailroom one point solution at a time.

Bowser is a New Orleans free-lance writer. E-mail, andrew@bowser.com.

Sources

Wayne Bean, Tucson Newspapers, 4850 South Park Ave., Tucson, Ariz. 85714.E-mail, wbean@azstarnet.com; phone, (520) 573-4450; fax, (520) 573-4688.
Chuck Blevins, Chuck Blevins and Associates, 1617 Montmorency Drive, Vienna, Va. 22182. E-mail, crblevins@ aol.com; phone, (703) 883-2200; fax, (703) 242-7712.
Harshad Matalia, NAA, 1921 Gallows Road, Suite 600, Vienna, Va. 22182. E-mail, matah@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1852; fax, (703) 902-1843.
Roger Miller, Craftsman Newspaper Production Systems, 5205 South County Road, 25A Suite C, Tipp City, Ohio 45371. E-mail, perrmill@juno.com; phone, (800) 762-5053; fax, (937) 669-2266.
John E. Prim, Prim Hall Enterprises Inc., 11 Spellman Road, Plattsburgh, N.Y. 12901. E-mail, primhall@aol.com; phone, (518) 561-7408; fax, (518) 563-1472.
Randy Seidel, GMA Inc., 2980 Avenue B, Bethlehem, Pa. 18017. E-mail, rseidel@gma.com; phone, (610) 964-9494; fax, (610) 694-0776.
Morgan Stout, Ovalstrapping Inc., 120 55th St. NE, Fort Payne, Ala. 35967. E-mail, Morgan_Stout@ovalstrapping.com; phone, (256) 845-1914; fax, (256) 845-1493.
Peter Tassinari, Heidelberg Web Systems, 121 Broadway, Dover, N.H. 03820. E-mail, peter.tassinari@us.heidelberg.com; phone, (603) 743-5316; fax, (603) 749-3301.
Roy Weeks, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, (202) 334-6301.
Dave Wineman, Heidelberg Web Systems, 4900 Webster St., Dayton, Ohio 45414.E-mail, dave.wineman@us.heidelberg.com; phone, (937) 278-2651; fax, (937) 278-9159.