32-Page Wide Webs

First announced two years ago, Brown Printing Co.'s $56-million expansion in Waseca, MN, is nearing completion. The printer broke ground on the project, situated about one hour south of its Minneapolis headquarters, in April 2005. Brown is adding 150,000 sq.ft. at multiple locations, including a six-story warehouse. Plant additions are being built for paper receiving, paper storage, shipping/receiving, press bays and automated storage/retrieval systems, bringing the total area to 775,000 sq.ft.

Two older web presses are being replaced with new, higher-capacity models, and the addition of bindery machinery is matching the added pressroom capacity. The plant's overall capacity is expected to increase by 15%, and about 30 new employees are being hired.

The showpieces of the expansion are two Goss Sunday 3000/32 web presses at a cost of about $20 million each. One was installed last summer; the second, scheduled for delivery in May, should go on line in September. The single-web, two-by-eight presses are replacing two older Harris M1000 two-by-four presses. Their cylinders output at rates up to 100,000 impressions per hour. The new 32-page presses have a 72´´ paper and plate width.

“The width advantage offers more pages per impression—and in industry-accepted page breaks of 8s, 16s and 32s,” says Jack Denz, Brown's technical director in Waseca. “There will be huge gains in book [publication] layout flexibility.”

Press capacity will more than double, he notes. “The 2×4 presses … produced 423 million impressions annually,” says Denz. “The new 2×8s are expected to produce a volume of 877 million impressions annually.” Overall capacity will increase by 16% across the plant, which features a total of 11 web presses, including seven Harris M1000s and two Baker-Perkins G-14 models. Press options include multi-folder capabilities and UV coating for four-, six- and eight-page gatefold covers.

Logistically, Brown is no stranger to handling the five-ton, 60´´ diameter paper rolls. The printer has been employing wide webs for nearly nine years in the 2×6 format at its East Greenville, PA facility; Waseca followed suit about five years ago, says Denz. The smaller non-print area and shorter cut-off are trademark benefits of the gapless Sunday 3000 format.

Goss offers high-speed pinless and combination folders, which reduce the bleed trim requirement on signatures. These complement the paper savings made possible by the small non-print area of the gapless press blankets. The presses are controlled by Goss Omnicon Controls and the Goss Web Center workflow system for automated presetting and reporting. Integrated auxiliary options include an Ecocool dryer with integrated chill rolls and fully automated Contiweb FD pasters to handle the big rolls.

In addition to the pressroom upgrades, a new Goss Universalbinder 2 adhesive binder was installed 10 months ago. When a second line is installed this April, Waseca's perfect binding capacity will increase by 28%. The units, which can produce up to 20,000 books per hour, each have 32 feed hoppers and demographic capabilities with two selective cover feeders for personalization. Inkjet locations include the outside surface of any signature—even inside ones; print direction may be perpendicular or parallel to spine in any location. Last year's installation of a new Gammeler RS111 off-line rotary trimmer has increased that capacity by 50%. “The new binders and trimmer enhance our ability to serve perfect- bound publications of 100,000 or longer runs,” says Denz.

There's also this past summer's installation of the latest technology in integrated factory automation from HK Systems, including a forklift-free Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to more efficiently store and move materials. There are 26 wire-guided AGVs now at work in Waseca, traversing back and forth, transporting loads from the press to the ASRS, from the ASRS to the bindery, and from the bindery to shipping. The ASRS includes six giant cranes that lift pallets of finished product and paper stock—the warehouse's 60´ ceiling has capacity to hold more than 13,000 pallets. Utilizing the ASRS for skid warehousing will make it possible for all roll stock to be stored on site, according to Denz.

Back in the pressroom, Brown employs a closed-loop system from Web Printing Controls (WPC). On the prepress side, two Kodak Magnus VLF (very large format) platesetters handle the extra-wide plates. The Waseca Division's premedia department installed an Integrated Color Solutions' Remote Director monitor proofing system in mid-2005. Virtual contract proofing has been driven largely by mega-customer Time, Inc., which assisted Brown with testing and implementation.

This past December, Waseca adopted iMirus Digital Solutions to digitize publications and documents for mass distribution. Brown also offers B.Direct Online, a service access portal to publisher/customer content through which users can interactively view and validate pages in real-time production.

Two years ago, Brown installed a DALiM MiSTRAL JDF-compliant, Web-based common electronic submission interface and print production management system. Computer systems integrator Blanchard Systems helped with the storage and communications infrastructure. All three Brown plants now run the same workflow and server interface.

Brown, Blanchard Systems, DALiM Software and DiMS! are working to create a central, bi-directional MIS interface to and from a DiMS! enterprise-wide print management system. All information will be entered using a graphical user interface and fed to MiSTRAL dynamically. Using DiMS!, job data will be entered only once by the right person, and will be sent through DiMS! and MiSTRAL to TWiST—and, ultimately, to plate. Much of the job data will be communicated with JDF and XML-specific tags.

Brown has printed magazine titles as diverse as Time, Essence and the New England Journal of Medicine in Waseca since the company began in 1957. Today, the firm is the country's fourth-largest printer of consumer, trade and business publications, producing more than 800 different magazines, catalogs and inserts. Its three-shift Minnesota operation ships 40 million magazines monthly. With two additional manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania and Woodstock, IL, Brown has annual sales of $400 million.

About 1,100 of the company's 2,600 employees are in Waseca, which last year took on more multi-language (English, French and Spanish) version work for the IKEA Group. The Swedish retailer enjoys a strong relationship with Brown's parent company, Gruner+Jahr, which has worked with the customer's facilities in Europe. (Gruner+Jahr of Germany, which acquired Brown in 1979, is one of the world's leading printers and publishers with more than $3.5 billion in sales.)

In the U.S., IKEA drops thousands of catalogs in daily and Sunday newspapers in a broad area surrounding each market. Page counts for product-specific books range between eight and 80, and typical print runs are around two million. The exception is its bedroom catalog, which features 96 pages plus a four-page cover and has a run of 7.4 million. The bulk of IKEA's 4-color catalogs are printed in Waseca, with a portion produced in the Pennsylvania plant, an hour from Philadelphia and 90 minutes from NYC.

The now 400,000-sq.ft. East Greenville Division added 50,000-sq.ft. six years ago, including an expanded bindery with a Goss (then Heidelberg) 16-pocket demographic saddlestitcher. Eight more pockets were added in 2003.

Brown purchased its northern Illinois facility, strategically located between Chicago and Milwaukee, from Graftek Press 10 years ago. The 400,000-sq.ft. plant—printer of Lord & Taylor catalogs, Macy's “magalogs” and popular magazines such as People, Sports Illustrated and Time—added four Heidelberg (now Goss) SP1000 saddlestitchers (25 pockets) in 2003.

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