Olympic has a newsprint-storage capacity of 50 days. The target is 21 days in-house and seven days in transit.

To understand where the organization stands in each of these areas, Kurtich recently contracted with Robert Bernatz & Associates to conduct a confidential survey. Unlike most employee surveys, however, this one was designed by operations employees. Three focus groups from each facility not only wrote the questions, but also helped design the survey process itself.

"The purpose of this survey is to find out how you feel about the new Operations values," Kurtich wrote to participants. "With this knowledge, we can begin to enhance our leadership, improve how we treat each other, change for the better how we feel about our work, and, I believe, enrich our lives."

Tours through the Olympic and Orange County facilities show that the new leadership values are alive and well-especially "excellence," and especially the part about "making continuous improvements and innovations in processes, practices and procedures."

"We used to be sensitive to mill strikes," says Dennis Taylor, the Times’ newsprint manager, recalling the nail-biting days of early 1995 when a strike at Fletcher Challenge Canada Ltd. mills in Campbell River and Crofton, B.C., brought his newsprint inventory down to less than one week (TechNews, March/April 1995, p. 17). During the strike, the Times was forced to borrow newsprint from its sister paper, The Sun in Baltimore. Rolls were transferred via rail at enormous cost, but the presses kept rolling.

To ensure the nightmare never happens again, the Times now receives newsprint from no fewer than five vendors-including ones in Korea and Norway. "The Korean newsprint performs really well on press," says Taylor, "and now we’re even looking at newsprint from Russia."

Poor rail service has caused the Times to change its rail/truck newsprint-delivery ratio from 75/25 to about 50/50. Olympic has a capacity of 50 days’ inventory, but the target is 21 days’ inventory in-house and seven days in transit.

Pages from the Times’ newsroom at Times Mirror Square are transmitted to Olympic’s platemaking area over T100 fiber-optic lines. Plates are imaged on Western Lithotech plate processors and readied for press on K&F Printing Systems International automatic benders.

Each of Olympic’s six Goss Colorliner presses, installed in 1989 and 1990, can produce 24 pages of process and four pages of spot color. Ink is preset using Parascan Inc. software that doubles as a soft-proofing system. A Denex Inc. totalizing system tracks both copies and newsprint-roll consumption.

There are no inserting machines in Olympic’s packaging area-daily inserts are handled by agents in the field, while Sunday inserting takes place at Times Community News in Glendale. Quipp Systems Inc. stackers and Dynaric Inc. strappers feed palletizers from Windab Inc., and full pallets are surrounded in stretchwrap by machines from Windab and Liberty Inc.

Unfortunately, the Times' cutting-edge collector system (TechNews, May/June 1996, p. 23) was not developed in time for the Olympic facility. "We were still working on the prototype here in Orange County when Olympic needed to automate," says David Skilliter, packaging and distribution group leader for Orange County operations, so Olympic went with the palletizing and stretchwrap machines.

The collector system has been running in Orange County since the summer of 1996 and was recently installed in the San Fernando Valley plant. Developed by the Times and manufactured by Machine Design Inc., the system won a Times Mirror innovation award in 1997. It’s easy to understand why-the 10 collectors installed in Orange County have given the Times a 22.5 percent return on its investment.

A visit to the Orange County facility reveals the elegance of the system’s design. Water atomizers spray copies before they enter a Quipp stacker, and also while they’re in the stacker. The water makes the copies adhere to one another, making stacks more manageable once they enter the collector system.

Once the stacker has built three consecutive stacks, a conveyor belt moves them onto a metal plate inside the collector. After the collector has built 12 stacks (four rows of three stacks each) on the metal plate, it quickly pulls away the plate, and the 12 stacks fall three inches onto a wooden platform within a large, blue container. (Think of the old tablecloth trick, where a magician yanks a tablecloth off the table without disturbing any dishes.)

Each of Olympic's six Goss Colorliner presses can produce 24 pages of process and four pages of spot color.

The platform, which sits on four pneumatic pistons, then indexes down by the height of the stacks, so the next set of 12 stacks falls only three inches onto the previous 12 stacks. This process continues until the blue container is filled. The container is then labeled automatically ("Route 980, Agent 3770, Container 1 of 2"), picked up by a forklift operator, and placed into a truck to be delivered to one of 32 distribution centers.

The collector system has eliminated straps, cardboard and stretchwrap. It has also improved product quality, because there are no longer any straps to tear the paper or smudge the ink on outer copies.

Korean newsprint and strapless bundling systems-the L.A. Times is certainly thinking outside the box. Given its recommitment to personal leadership throughout its operations, it can expect such thinking to continue.

Clark Robinson is the editor of TechNews. E-mail, robic@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1686; fax, (703) 902-1690.

TechNews Volume 4, Number 5: September/October 1998

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