Daily News Saves Storage Space
Shortly after Fred Drasner and Mortimer Zuckerman purchased the Daily News of New York, they commissioned a new production facility in Liberty Park, N.J., to replace two existing satellite plants in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and make the production process more efficient and cost-effective.
The 435,000-square-foot Liberty Park facility houses nine new Goss presses capable of running up to 32 pages of color. Three 2,400-square-foot areas--a maintenance shop room, machine shop room, and electrical room--were set aside to support specific parts of the facility.
To store large volumes of spare parts and equipment in a relatively small area and provide the ability to roll out parts right to the press, management turned to Lista International, based in Holliston, Mass. Lista provided each of the facility's three support areas a combination of storage walls, workbenches, modular drawer storage cabinets and roll-out tool carts.
The storage walls allow machinists to store oversized items such as motors, gears, bearings and drive shafts on shelves and smaller items like drill bits and hand tools in drawers. With an overall height of 98-7/16 inches, the storage walls make maximum use of available storage height and floor space.
Drawers feature a usable height of 5-1/16 to 11 inches, while partition and divider accessories allow for the creation of customized compartments that can accommodate parts of various sizes and shapes. The full-extension feature of the drawers allows employees to view a drawer's total contents, enabling fast retrieval of stored items.
Workbenches, furnished with maple tops, are used for such tasks as cleaning ink manifolds and assembling electrical components. They feature a modular configuration which can be modified as requirements change. In addition, the cabinets, doubling as pedestals for the workbenches, are suitable for storing of a wide range of tools and parts.
The cabinets, storage walls and roll-out carts were painted to match the color of the presses, which has helped integrate the plant's overall appearance. When the cabinet drawers are closed, the handles are flush with the housing, improving safety.
The master-lock feature of the cabinets allows mechanics to access certain parts while restricting access to others. This security feature has helped the company keep tighter control of inventory and improve overall parts accountability.
Perhaps the most significant and functional elements of the Lista system are the roll-out carts. According to Vinnie Grosso, production maintenance manager, the mobility of these carts help the newspaper conserve time.
"The roll-out carts have given our machinists the capability to bring a large volume of tools and parts right to the printing presses when repairs or maintenance is required," he explains. "The bottom line is repairs are effected more quickly, and downtime is greatly reduced."
Besides mobility, the roll-out carts, when stationary, also provide additional workspace--when not in use, they can be stored snugly under the workbenches.
Management has been enthusiastic about the increased sense of organization and efficiency that the storage system has brought to the Daily News. More importantly, says Grosso, employees have embraced the system as well.
"Our employees are quite pleased with the Lista system," he says, "not only from an organizational point of view but aesthetically as well. It has helped them become more productive and has improved the overall working atmosphere."