IF A CERTAIN DANISH LAGER company were ever to go into the newspaper printing business, the ‘Best in the World’ newspaper production plant it might come up with would look a lot like the Newsprinters plant at Broxbourne.

This is the flagship of the three News International-owned print operations in the UK and by far the largest; even, probably, the largest newspaper plant in the world. The plant at Eurocentral near Glasgow operates two presses; that at Knowsley, close to Liverpool, operates five machines. Broxbourne has 12, six on either side of a central aisle and arranged as mirrored presses serving a single folder. The building, opened just three years after planning permission was sought, runs 240 metres from end to end and sits like a giant ship docked into the constantly flowing stream of the M25. Its first live production run took place almost exactly a year ago on October 14. Today it can produce 3.2 million newspapers each night, 2.65 million on Saturdays.

As has been noted before, the Rupert Murdoch-owned business is making a £650 million statement of faith in the future of the printed newspaper. The logic is not all founded on the idea of printing four-colour newspapers to attract better rates from advertisers and allow editorial to create more impact with news and features pages. There is a very strong cost saving element involved, thanks to high levels of automation, the elimination of on-site inserting and even the outsourcing of non-key functions. Where there were 1,200 staff at Wapping, Broxbourne has 450 on site, only 250 of these employed by Newsprinters.

Of the directly employed staff, around 50% have moved from Wapping, many others taking the generous redundancy terms on offer. Selection of those who came, explains Allan Wain, manufacturing director, was based on attitude before technical knowledge. “We were looking for the people with the best attitudes, the best sickness record, the willingness to share knowledge with colleagues, showing commitment and flexibility,” he says. “We wanted people who were ready to engage with each other and to smile.”

The idea is that the skills can be learned and people trained for technical competence, as has happened. Crews across the three plants have spent months in Augsburg on training to run the presses, causing Manroland to adapt some of the ways of training that Newsprinters used for its more general press training.

Many of the indirectly employed are engaged in plate making, where instead of its own staff, Newsprinters has subbed out the production of accurate plates to Agfa, which in turn has outsourced the labour involved. But there are efforts to prevent a ‘them and us’ atmosphere through joint events and out-of-hours activities.

Agfa has equipped the plant with Polaris XVC4 platesetters – four shared between two presses, each capable of more than 200 plates an hour. Plates are imaged, bent and sorted, then marked with a barcode to the printer’s requirements.

The idea is that Newsprinters pays only for good plates. If the outsourced team brings in plates on time, to the right quality, then it should make money; if it is wasteful then its margins will be hit. Either way the printer knows what it is paying per plate and controls its costs.

Likewise inserting is something for the news sellers or supplement printers to take care of, for the simple reason that should an insert not feed properly, production can be affected, right up to the speeds the presses run at. Secondly, controlling a stack of papers stuffed with inserts is not ideal for delivering neatly stacked bundles.

Downstairs in the reel handling area, Manroland’s Aurosys automation has replaced logging in and moving reels into and out of storage. Later reel preparation is entirely automated, with the wrap taken off and the reel pasted up under the watchful eyes of human operators, who look but generally do not touch. Each of the twin lines can prepare 30 reels an hour. Most are the full width of 2211mm; but in all, six different widths can be used, and their locations in the 3,860-reel capacity store needed to be logged.

It seems a perfect system, but it is not – at least not yet. Wain points to where perhaps a dozen reels held after coming off the automatic unloading system are waiting to be sent back to the paper mills. All are damaged, either by stones, tears or water ingress suffered by the paper at the mill or on its journey around the M25. Then there are the different styles of wrapping to contend with, necessitating some wastage as preparation standards are dictated by the worst supplier, not the best. “Until the mills can give us the perfect reel, we will have to have people to do visual checks on the paper,” says Wain. Ideally, he would like to be working with paper from just four mills.

The reel stands themselves are fully automatic, feeding paper upwards to the Manroland Colorman XXL press towers. With the move to triple-width printing, the decision was to stay with nine-cylinder configurations for four-colour printing rather than choose four hi units where the distance between colours risked losing register and encouraging fan-out. It has been the right decision. There is no register control system on the press: the accuracy of plate making and of plate loading means that register is always on, aided by digitally controlled servo motors to manage each function.

Colour is slightly different. The new presses print sharper than the Wapping machines with 21-22% dot gain in the mid tones, rather than 29% previously. This means a change in specification to advertisers. Colour density is set at: 1.1K, 0.85C, 0.85M and 0.7Y.

Micromarks are used to measure this during the run using handheld densitometers which feed directly into the colour control system. Newsprinters has adapted the Viptronic densitometers to make them wireless, rather than have them dangling from a lead or risk it being pulled out.

Closed loop colour, as on a heatset press, is not specified. Nor was robotic plate loading, for the simple reason that Newsprinters knew nothing about the development of this technology. Instead it has PPL, which releases a plate and clamps the replacement in position automatically. Exactly which plates are changed is managed through the press management system and controlled by the barcodes on the plates. With up to 480 plates required for a 120pp tabloid, the system needs to be accurate. PPL has helped slash make ready times, but Newsprinters would want more and would clearly like to be able to retrofit the robotic system.

Start-up waste and make ready is a stride forward from Wapping. Waste levels in east London could be 7-8%; in Hertfordshire they are an average of 5%, though for the News of the World, which prints 1.4 million copies on a Saturday night, waste is 1%. Ten minutes after a plate change the presses are running at 80,000cph. The attention to detail in running the presses has led to a dramatic drop in web breaks. Eurocentral leads the way followed by Knowsley and then Broxbourne. “It’s all down to reel preparation,” says Wain. “We have a target of zero web breaks, and to change the culture so that web breaks are not accepted; and so we have a meeting whenever there is a web break, not where there has a been a clutch of four or five in a short time.”

Displays around the production areas show the run rate for waste and web breaks on each title to all staff.

An area that still needs attention is the blanket, he continues. “These have definitely been the biggest issue,” he says. The blanket needs to be metal-backed because of the narrow plate gap and speed of operation, with trials being run on each of the potential suppliers. The issue is achieving a good combination of ink, fount, blanket and speed throughout the range of the press.

The folder is another development for Newsprinters, after Manroland was convinced that it would be possible to strengthen components such as the collecting drum and build a 4:7:7 folder. This will deliver six products at once, three of the them stitched inline using Tolerans heads. Ferag grippers, Apollo conveyors and DAN palletisers deliver bundled sections for delivery on reusable plastic pallets to the trunkers, loaded from the end as most warehousing operations choose to do rather than from the side as newspapers have traditionally done.

The great advantage of the Broxbourne operation is that, because it is a greenfield operation, it has been possible to examine tradition and, where found wanting, to cast it aside. The company has aimed for the best in every field. Lean management methods, the tell-tale grid markings to show that ‘kanban’ systems are in place, and KPI charts are visible signs. Its environmental targets have led to ISO 14001, with full recovery of blanket wash and minimal waste to landfill, with these sorts of thinking built in from the out set, not added to an existing though process. “We want people to come in here in three years’ time and go Wow!” says Wain.

It is however, already having this effect. The plant was built to suit the needs of the News International and to print The Sun, The Times, News of the World and The Sunday Times adding The London Paper to this list, though because of some of the access issues, only a portion of the last title is printed at Broxbourne. But a massive investment of this kind cannot be ignored and the Telegraph group has moved the printing of its papers from West Ferry Printers to Broxbourne to take advantages of the colour, the formatting advantages and some of the other efficiencies on offer. At Eurocentral in Glasgow, Newsprinters is producing the 200pp Solicitors’ Property Guide, while Knowsley is printing freesheets for Champion Newspapers, a Lancashire publisher. Other contract printing work cannot be far behind, though Wain points out that there is little scope for a high circulation national daily at Broxbourne now. With investment in a press capable of printing four-colour throughout and giving decent pagination costing close to £20 million, other newspaper groups will be assessing how they move forwards. In the last few weeks, the Liverpool Echo has announced that its own printing plant will close and production will switch to Trinity Mirror’s site in Manchester. Northcliffe will also be looking at options as existing presses come up for replacement. Meanwhile smaller publishers will be casting around. Wain confirms this. “Other newspaper groups have expressed an interest in printing here and those discussions are taking place,” he says. “We have the capacity for weeklies, for freesheets and supermarket flyers, and for specialist publications. To any publishers who would have to spend £15-20 million, the message is ‘come and talk to us’.”

If this happens to the degree that is possible, News International will once again have changed the shape of the UK newspaper printing industry, and on the way Newsprinters will be within its rights to claim the title of the Best Newspaper Printer in the World.