Despite declining newspaper circulation, News Corp Australia is investing millions of dollars into new mailroom equipment for its east coast print sites.
The newspaper giant will upgrade six of its ageing publishing lines in three sites to new technology from Ferag in a deal that was two years in the making.
Production and logistics national director Geoff Booth says the company has been carrying the more than 20-year-old machinery for too long and an upgrade is badly needed.
“Maintenance is expensive and we have struggled for some time to replace parts and we cannot afford to wait until the lines completely fail,” he says.
“Parts from the old lines will be used as spares for the remaining old systems when the new ones come online.”
Booth says the difficulty will be to swap out the publishing lines while News produces millions of newspaper copies a day on its network.
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Unlike previous new lines that sought to add new features or deal with increased demand, this investment is just about meeting deadlines and not having any serious failure.
The upgrade will begin beginning in September replacing two of its four Sydney systems, then two of four in Brisbane and two of six Melbourne with the project to be complete by August 2017.
The investment comes two years after News installed a similar new publishing line in its Darwin printing plant.
Booth says while the machines will be faster, have better capacity and be more efficient, they will handle the same workload and there are no plans to downsize the fleet – though neither are there plans for more presses.
The system collates and inserts catalogues, pre-printed commercial inserts and newspaper sections, and then stacks and straps the papers ready for distribution.
The two Ferag MultiStack compensating stackers can bundle up to 75,000 copies an hour and a FlyStream pre-selecting line that uses high-speed hoppers to gather the inserts.
Booth highlights decoupling the press from the publishing line using a DiscPool multi-disc winding system as a feature that will make the process more reliable as one can keep going if the other stops.
Based on Ferag's high-speed UniDrum technology, the RSD Rollsert system reduces waste with an automatic format presetting and a self-repair system which detects skewed copies and incomplete sections and corrects instead of just dropping them.
News Corp newspaper circulation continues to fall, down between 6.7 and 7.8 per cent on its biggest titles last year, but it still has eight old machines to retire if running them all becomes uneconomical in the future.
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