50 PRINT21 APRIL 2010

and develop “high differentiation potential”. He talks a great deal about the structural change underway and how printers must develop “innovative business models” to meet it.

On the night at Richmond, he was preaching to the converted. The continuing success of Hannapak in the offset packaging market can, in no small way, be sheeted home to its willingness to invest in the latest press technology and automation from manroland. Charles Hanna and now his son, Sam, are recognised as pioneers in offset production and their latest ‘fi rst’ is in keeping with the family tradition. They are also exemplars of Dr Rall’s exhortation of adding value to print.

A new order of o! set pressesAccording to Tony Kenney, the new Roland 700 HiPrint with InlineFoiler is part of a radical overhaul of one of the best-known press lines in the industry. A complete refresh has seen manroland incorporate some state-of-the-art technologies never before seen in sheetfed printing.

Kenney, who is notable for being one of the best-known offset printing experts around the world while being practically unknown in his native Australia, was on hand at Hannapak to take the assembled printers through the fi ner points of the press and the InlineFoil process. He conducted two tours, one for those who wanted a technical insight into the latest printing enhancements and the second for those who were more interested in the production process, especially with regards to the InlineFoiler.

He spent some time on the fact that the new manroland press line is now

climate when offset investment is hard to come by, the fortunes of the company rest squarely on demonstrating the benefi ts of value-added printing.

Not just a press makerAccording to Dr Rall, the time for business as usual is over for the printing industry. Following an almost catastrophic fall off in offset press demand, the press manufacturers are emphasising as never before their role as technological partners with printers. The sense that we are all in this together is very evident. It is imperative that manroland convinces its printing customers that value-added printing is the only sensible course for survival.

Depending on whose fi gures you take, manroland is the largest web offset press manufacturer in the world and is second or third in sheetfed offset. It has always occupied the high end of large-format sheetfed, especially for the packaging industry. Its presses are fully automated and there is no such thing as a ‘stripped down’ manroland. Undoubtedly this has caused it to occasionally lose sales in the commodity print market—the uninspired CMYK four-over-four operations—but it has ensured it remains the fl agship press for high-volume publication and packaging printers where automation and reliability are essential.

For Rall, the forces that are shaping the daily routing of the printing industry, such as increasing price competition, are making companies re-position themselves

Putting value back into print

Value-added printing

The last time I had the opportunity to visit Charles Hanna’s print works at Hannapak on the outskirts of Sydney was in 1993. Back then the factory had been turned into a night club, with

restaurant tables, polished fl oors, music, a light show… and the fi rst manroland 700 press in the country. The launch was a great success, representative of another time when business was more relaxed and marketing dollars fl owed freely.

The press too was a great success for Charles Hanna and his packaging company —then Hannamatch, now Hannapak. He went on to team it up with another 700 in 1996, a 900 in 2002 and, in 2009, he installed the region’s fi rst new generation manroland 700 HiPrint press with InlineFoiler. It complements the others by being a value-add press—there is not a straight four-colour machine on the fl oor.

Last month, the newly-established regional manroland company, headed up by Steve Dunwell, hosted another Open House at Hannapak. In keeping with the more serious times we live in, there was little of the fl imfl am and glamour of the fi rst time around but there was a star attraction—the InlineFoiler on the manroland press. The event attracted the attendance of manroland board member, Dr. Markus Rall, the most senior member of the company to visit Australia since it decided on direct representation.

Apart from extending courtesy to Hannapak as an exemplary manroland site, he came because, in the current

Anyone can do CMYK, four-over-four, printing on 95gsm. It’s a no-brainer, a basic commodity in today’s media saturated world. And there is no money in it. However, for anyone seriously looking to di! erentiate from the mass of low-value print " ooding the market, there’s good news: manroland has introduced a new value-added printing opportunity to the local market with its InlineFoiler. Patrick Howard reports from Richmond.

Patrick Howard

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PRINT21 APRIL 2010 51

ending up with a telephone call from the customer to discuss a claim,” said Kenney.

Controlling the InlineSorter is the InlineInspector, a press-mounted camera that detects a wrong sheet.

“The key to the technology is not just the optics but the software,” said Kenney. “We now digitally record every sheet that is in the production run. We measure it optically and give a signal when a sheet is out of the OK target. There are fi ve levels of sensitivity that can be selected.”

What printers will doFor Steve Dunwell, the commissioning of the Hannapak manroland 700 HiPrint with InlineFoiler is a gift. It allows him to show that the local market is ready for the most sophisticated printing technology.

“It’s not just for packaging,” he said. “Inline foiling is being used by commercial printers around the world for a whole range of value-added printing, from magazines to catalogues to labels. It allows printers to differentiate themselves, gives them great value to market to their customers.

“When you look at the results being achieved by Hannapak it’s easy to see how printers can add value back into print.”

Not a foiling pressBut on the night, everyone was there to see the InlineFoiler and how it operates. The rather ungainly-looking twin towers above the second and third printing units are not printing units, rather unwinding and rewinding stations for the foil. This is the fi rst extraordinary facet of the technology —foiling is used as a base under the fi nished print, not as it is usually done, offl ine on top of the print. It is, in Kenney’s words, “not a foiling process but a radical new printing process.”

The fi rst printing unit lays down adhesive ink (glue) to the required foil design onto the substrate via a normal litho plate process. Passing under the fi rst tower the foil is transferred to the areas with the adhesive image. As the foil is rewound, the sheet enters the fi rst CMYK printing unit and the image is printed on top of the foil.

The new generation Roland 700 HiPrint at Hannapak is a seven-colour press able to add a special colour—essential in packaging—as well as coating.

“In addition, it has one of most radical technology developments to manage customer claims, our inline sheet ejection system—the InlineSorter—another example of web press technology coming to sheetfed,” said Kenney.

The module, installed just before the delivery stack, has an inline ejection gate—similar to what most newspaper, commercial web offset and gravure presses have had for 15 plus years. It is designed to eject start-up waste or bad sheets—reducing the risk that they end up in the fi nished stack, get missed in the bindery process, in quality control and end up on the customer’s delivery dock.

“Most importantly, it eliminates

complete, with every size press, from the A3 format Roland 50 up to the 64-page Roland 900XXL, using the same double-diameter impression cylinders and double-diameter skeleton transfer construction, the same transfer systems and the same ink trains. Much of the development is an intelligent technology-transfer between manroland’s web presses and its sheetfed range. The advantage of uniformity can be seen in transferable service and operator knowledge across the range of presses.

He pointed out the three key areas where manroland is concentrating its development:1. Inline everything—whatever can be

done in one pass, will be done in one pass. Printers are demanding one-pass production where there is only one make-ready, one production run and one wash-up.

2. Quick-change everything—this is a result of the new design where the engineers went through every element of the press from the feeder through to the offi ce, looking where they could save 30 secs here, three minutes there and 15 minutes somewhere else. The results can be seen in servo motors that are twice as fast, a new ink fountain surface that saves up to two minutes of wash-up time per ink fountain and a QuickChange clamp that can save up to 8-12 minutes on the coater forme change-over.

3. DirectDrive—perhaps the most radical area that takes sheetfed printing to a new level, the ability to multitask make-ready functions by a factor of three! Today’s presses are single tasking—they can do one job at a time; wash up, change plates, load the ink profi le. What DirectDrive does with its two-clutch system is do three things at the same time.

Value-added printing

LEFT: “Take a look at this!” Tony Kenney with an inline foiled sheet straight from the press.

RIGHT: The players on the night: (le! to right) Dr Markus Rall, director manroland Germany, Sam and Charles Hanna of Hannapak and Steve Dunwell, managing director, manroland Australia.

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