This summer, the hottest development for the Los Angeles Times at its Orange County printing facility will be the completed implementation of its in-house-designed automatic bulk-handling system, which relies on its innovative "Times cube." The new system simplifies the bulk-handling process, reduces costs and improves the quality of the product on its route to the consumer.
In Orange County, each press line is configured with two loaders that can be fed from three different stackers. Each loader is designed to handle the throughput of 1,216 96-page papers, or roughly 40 bundles per minute, which allows the Times to run their presses at about 70,000 copies an hour.
The new system evolved out of the need to replace the Times' outdated manual bundling system. In 1993, with conventional bulk handling, the Times had street-level delivery from 260 delivery or distribution points. Individual bundles were loaded onto trucks.
As a result of a distribution project that same year, the Times created dock-level centers, and the number of distribution points dropped from 260 to 64. In addition, individual bundles were replaced by pallet loads. And it was the manual palletizing that eventually inspired the cube--the new system's highlight.
The container system takes untied, compensated stacks of newspapers from a stacker and conveys them into the Times cube for delivery to the field for final distribution.
Stacks of untied newspapers are moved one at a time on a synchronized conveyor from a conventional stacker. They are transported to the first assembly station, formed into a bank of three and conditioned. The benefits: First, this process accumulates cycle time. Second, the bank of newspapers is more stable to transport through the rest of the process.
Once assembled, the stacks are released and moved into the collector chamber. En route, the bank passes through a second assembly station that acts as a buffer while the main collector is going through its cycle. The buffer only occurs if the float rate of product requires a pause.
Once in the collection chamber, several sequences occur simultaneously--the stripper plate moves in cycle with the table and backstop plate. Since lateral movement of untied newspaper stacks is a difficult task, supporting them on both sides removes the risk of having them topple. The bottom half of the stack points the folded edge, or the nose, in the direction of travel.
At the time of lateral movement and table pullout, paper-to-table friction is against the fold. For the Times, this is the key element in the elimination of bottom-copy damage.
After a layer of 12 stacks is gathered, the stripper plate and the adjacent sidewall compress, forming a tight, square cube ready for a container.
The specialized container is designed with a floating bottom floor. As it sits in the load position, the floating floor is raised from beneath to the top of the container.
As the table is pulled out from under the stacks, the drop distance is less than three inches. This short drop helps maintain the integrity of the stacks.
Once all of the stacks are sitting on the floor of the container, the floor is lowered to a point where the top of the papers is again three inches from the bottom of the table. This sequence is repeated until the container has the required amount of layers. Then the container is ejected.
The full containers are transported to a nesting device, automatically stacked, then picked up by a forklift and loaded onto a truck.
The floating floor not only facilitates the loading but also the unloading by raising the product to waist-high level for simple newspaper removal. The floor is raised by means of a forklift device.
Because you're working at waist level, you're eliminating a lot of work-related injuries that we had in the manual environment. Also, because you're no longer stacking down, you're no longer bending to lift bundles.
You also need fewer workers. With manual palletizing, we had 20 people stacking down on five presses. We also had five people moving the skids after the stack-down process to the two stretch-wrap machines. Therefore, we had 27 people working on the floor on a 96-page product that was split among five presses.
With the new container system, each of the five presses has an operator, and they are assisted by two utility persons--period. We reduced staffing from 27 to seven.
Other prime advantages of the container system are the elimination of the need for consumables--strapping, bottom wrap, shrink warp, and slip sheets--while it also ensures zero product damage. By eliminating tying the bundle, it reduces tearing the top and the bottom copies of the newspaper in a stack or in a bundle.
The system is already proving cost-effective. The internal rate of return for this project was 21 percent vs. 16 percent with conventional palletizing. The difference largely comes from eliminating the consumables.
The bottom line: The cube works so well that the Times has a patent pending.
Arif Haji is assistant director of operations at the Orange County printing plant of the Los Angeles Times. Phone, (714) 966-5790; fax, (714) 966-7849.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.