Trinity Mirror Printing Count on Harland Simon 26th May 2006

When Trinity Mirror Printing wanted better management information at their impressive new print facility in Birmingham, they asked Harland Simon to provide it. The site has four Goss Colorliner presses with Honeywell controls, but as John Brewis the General Manager at the plant explains ‘Although we have a great production facility with excellent new presses and inserting equipment, we simply couldn’t get the information that we needed to run the plant at the level of performance we aspire to.

I wanted a system that could give us live information to improve our on-the-run decision making but also collect data and produce reports of results to fuel our improvement efforts.  We needed a system that increased the visibility of copy count throughout the line so that edition lifts could be more accurate, reducing material waste and reducing the time spent waiting for counts to be checked.

Being able to collate and classify data about where waste is coming from is fundamental to our improvement efforts and we needed a system that could collect or infer counts from folder to bundle.  We also wanted a system to collect stop reasons and be easy to use so that we can achieve our aim of removing paper records from the administrative system.’

The ‘system’ that Brewis refers to is Harland Simon’s prima.net system. It sits beside the existing press management system to provide detailed copy counting throughout the press hall and publishing areas. Press operators interface with the system via touch screens mounted on the control desks and the system counts copies via the existing copy counters. The result is that the management team at Birmingham can now see in real time how many copies they’ve printed and can therefore manage the pull-down sequence much more efficiently.

Brewis says ‘Although we’ve only had the prima.net system in for a few weeks now, we are already seeing results.  I was very impressed with the calibre of the people from Harland Simon, who worked with our in house electricians to deliver a smooth installation within budget.  Our waste has reduced and the reports that we get will enable us to improve our performance even more.’

A spokesperson for Harland Simon said ‘This is another example of a newspaper site that printed excellent copy but knew that they could tighten their grip on waste if they could get better management information. Once again, Harland Simon had the right system and skills to meet their requirements quickly and cost-effectively. We were delighted to be able to help’.

For more information, please contact Rob Watson, Sales Director on Tel: +44 (0) 1908 276700. Email: rob.watson@harlandsimon.com

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