The Jubilee 50th Installation of Reprograf and ACCHSH at New Orkla Printing House in Poland

Warsaw, 03.10.2006

On September 1 the new Orkla-owned newspaper printing house Echo Media in Tarnobrzeg started its operation.
The machinery park of the facility includes e.g. two alfaQuest CtP systems driven by ACCHSH PuzzleFlow-based WebPairer module. The whole system was delivered by Reprograf company. The Tarnobrzeg’s installation was the jubilee 50th common delivery of CtP systems offered by Reprograf and ACCHSH’s workflow.

The factory in Tarnobrzeg is the 8th printing house owned by the Orkla company in Poland. It will print mainly titles published by the Norwegian publishing house (currently two newspapers are printed here) as well as jobs ordered by external customers from the south-eastern part of Poland. The machinery park of Echo Media consists of a MAN Roland Colorman 35 coldset printing press, Ferag post press lines and inserting drum and in the area of prepress – two FasTRAK 150/V photopolymer CtP systems from alfaQuest (producing 125 plates per hour at 1016 dpi resolution) with on-line Glunz & Jensen processing units.

Both imaging and processing lines are integrated with the system which transports plates to bending/punching units and sends them to four independent stocks. It is a fully automated plate production system, in which both platesetters stand as a back-up for each other – Dariusz Kosinski, Product Manager at Reprograf says. – The system includes automatic plate feeding and safety sheets removal units, offering a capacity up to 1000 plates and allowing continuous 8-hour production with 250 plates per hour throughput.

The CtP systems are controlled by PuzzleFlow-based WebPairer module created by ACCHSH. The complete system was delivered by Reprograf, the exclusive representative of alfaQuest company in Poland and one of Polish dealers of ACCHSH software.

Lech Szczepanski, managing director of Echo Media, says: The decision process about CtP system took almost a year. We wanted to find out about all solutions available at the market and one of the most important factors was an automatic banding and punching functions offered by the system. We don’t have any traditional prepress equipment and there is no place for installing such devices. Finally, we chose the offer of Reprograf, our long-term partner in CtF technology used by other Orkla printing houses in Poland. WebPairer, as an optimum solution for our production, was also suggested by Reprograf.

The software implemented at Echo Media is the ACCHSH’s highly advanced PuzzleFlow workflow system equipped with WebPairer module devoted especially for newspaper production. It provides a set of tools for job tracking and deadline control to customise the pairing process for newspaper production requirements. WebPairer is an Internet browser-based tool, allowing job tracking from every workstation having Internet access.

WebPairer performs three stage processing. The pre-imposition stage includes preflighting, page geometry correction, colour correction, personalisation etc. The second stage is imposition – page pairing and powerful plate naming management. The final stage is post-imposition – OPI resolving, resampling, separation, halftoning, postflight and output redistribution. The additional deadline control module allows job tracking, deadline control and informs about possible delays. At Echo Media it is integrated with a barcode reader installed in the Imagefinder system, being a part of the whole CtP system.

Lech Szczepanski says: WebPairer software, delivered as a part of the CtP system, offers the highest technical level. Its implementation and fitting to our needs only took a week. During that time we established working schedules for our cooperation with editorial departments. We are very satisfied about working with WebPairer as well as about technical support offered by the vendors. Their reaction is always immediate and we can see their full commitment to this first in Poland installation of CtP/workflow in such a configuration.

The cooperation between ACCHSH and Reprograf companies was established in 2002. Since that time the PuzzleFlow system has been delivered with tens of CtP systems offered by Reprograf (mainly Screen devices). The Orkla contract for Tarnobrzeg facility was announced at last year’s IfraExpo fair in Leipzig. It was the 50th common installation of both companies’ solutions. In 2004 and 2005 Reprograf was one of the best ACCHSH’s dealers of PuzzleFlow in Poland. Last year the company sold approx. 30 PuzzleFlow licenses.

Concluding the Tarnobrzeg part of ACCHSH and Reprograf cooperation Lech Szczepanski of Echo Media says: We are very glad about cooperation with our long-term and established partner – Reprograf as well as ACCHSH company, representing the highly advanced software technology made in Poland.