DAYTON'S CYBER-FLIGHT

And the envelope please…

The award for coolest presentation at this year’s SuperConference goes to Stan Richmond, vice president of operations for Cox Ohio Publishing in Dayton. You could almost hear people’s jaws dropping at Tuesday’s session on hot new technologies, as Richmond took his audience on a high-speed computerized tour of the Dayton Daily News’ Print Technology Center.

Richmond started his cyber-tour by placing his audience in mid-air, hovering over 3D representations of each element in the new plant. He then swooped in closer, gave the audience a newspaper’s-eye-view ride along the various conveyors, and stopped at each relevant piece of machinery. To top it off, Richmond then made the 3D version of the equipment morph into a photograph of the real thing.

Richmond had four goals for the new plant: reduced staffing, reduced newsprint consumption, better package integrity, and 100 percent internal assembly of the daily product. He is reaching them via cutting-edge equipment, including Heidelberg’s new LSS900 line storage system (see "Dayton Flies Into the Future," TechNews, January/February 2000, pp. 22-26).

Rich Cunningham, director of technology marketing for Central Newspapers Technology Corp. in Phoenix, had earlier kicked off the session with a discussion of how his company successfully deployed "soft books" to its carriers.

The soft book is a flat, tablet-like computer that mounts on a car’s dashboard. Though developed to deliver book content electronically, it is helping CNT make its distribution operations profitable. Carriers download pertinent information into the soft book, including electronic route lists, delivery directions, delivery instructions and product codes.

Now into place at Central Newspapers' The Arizona Republic, the soft books are paying for themselves in both reduced costs and higher revenues. Delivery errors are down, and the new tool enables address-specific delivery of other products, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Investor’s Business Daily. Possible future applications include route mapping, two-way paging, and tracking carriers via Global Positioning System technology.

"What is a pre-press guy doing at a post-press event?" asked Steve Nilan, principal consultant for Nilan-Sanders Associates LLC. The answer: presenting information about newspaper manufacturing work flow, which is pertinent to both production areas. Nilan drove home the point that manufacturing processes cannot be improved if they cannot be controlled, and they can’t be controlled if they can’t be measured.

European newspapers are ahead of their American counterparts in getting production down to a science, Nilan said, because their processes are more structured. Because of their flexibility, American processes remind him of jazz music, while European processes are more like classical music.

Consultant Chuck Blevins continued the international theme by discussing newspaper automation in Europe and Japan. These regions don’t have enough people to produce an ever-more-complex product, he said, leading newspapers toward completely "lights out" production.

-Clark Robinson