Sunday Assembly Is but a Dream
by Steve Ostrofsky
After another grinding 12-hour day getting out the Sunday package, the production manager's head hits the pillow, and he instantly falls asleep. Gradually, a vision appears before him:
The smell of fuel and smoking rubber, the crowd a blur on either side--he's thundering around the oval at the Indianapolis 500, leading the race with one lap to go. Around him, millions of dollars of finely tuned technology. Behind him, the efforts of a huge team of professionals. With the finish in sight, he approaches pit row for the last time, hops out of his car and onto the tricycle his pit crew has ready for him, and pedals furiously. Crossing the line, he throws his hands into the air--he's done it!
Only a weird dream, you might say, but one similar to the weekly drill at almost every large newspaper. In a typical Sunday production cycle, highly developed presses and packaging equipment produce advance and final press-run sections under elaborate schedules. But the final step, the assembly of the entire Sunday paper, is invariably done by hand under great time pressure--either in the mailroom, or in the field in a distribution center, parking lot or a carrier's car.
At first glance, this remnant of manual labor at the critical last step of a computer-driven, highly technical process seems like a throwback, but the industry is not aggressively pressing for an automated solution. The reason? The size of a typical major-metro Sunday paper creates a mechanical challenge surpassing the capabilities of current packaging equipment. Furthermore, designing equipment that could handle the problem runs is difficult to justify for a once-a-week event.
Mechanically, the problem comes down to size. The greater the number and size of inserts that have to be handled, the slower the equipment runs and the greater the chance of missing or damaged inserts. A typical major-metro Sunday paper can be thought of as a bundle of several insert packages, each larger than the largest weekday paper. Even if the current generation of inserting and materials-handling equipment could physically combine these large packages, the combination of slower speed and larger press runs would be lethal to timely delivery.
Operationally, the task of assembling the Sunday paper in-house would strain many newspaper facilities beyond their limits. Instead of shipping advance pre-run sections to the field (distribution centers, parking lots, etc.), the entire Sunday product would have to be stored in the packaging department. Even if a plant were designed to handle the volume, it would sit mostly empty for six days out of seven. Furthermore, the physical volume of an entire Sunday paper produced in-house would have to be loaded on trucks within a reasonable delivery cycle, overtaxing fleets.
Although the economic winds are blowing strongly against any near-term changes, there has been some interest in exploring automatic alternatives. Several years ago, Walter Wild, president of Ferag Inc.'s U.S. division, received an inquiry from a large U.S. newspaper chain to study final package assembly at one of its big properties. After some study, Wild says, the project evaporated.
GMA Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Randy Seidel says its current equipment does a reasonable job with fairly big packages, and that GMA has a "vision" of a solution for combining large Sunday products. However, he acknowledges that the cost of equipment for a once-weekly product would probably rule out development.
Although the concept of efficient, accurate fully automated assembly of the Sunday paper is certainly attractive, it will remain a fantasy for the immediate future. Until the problem is solved, operations managers will just have to keep on pedaling.
Steve Ostrofsky is president of Publishing Productivity Systems Inc., Gig Harbor, Wash. E-mail, stevelo@ptinet.net; phone, (253) 853-4540.