In this day and age, new printing plants are few and far between. No one is going to pour money into a strategy of ‘if you build it, they will come’ – the only smart reason to go the greenfield route would be a guaranteed contract from a marquee client. ACP is one such client, and the magazine publisher’s New Zealand portfolio is just such a contract. When the tender came up for titles that include Woman’s Day, the NZ edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly and Property Press, the contract didn’t go to one of the ‘big two’ incumbents, APN and PMP. The entire portfolio went to Blue Star’s web arm, Webstar.
Webstar has been a mainstay on the NZ print landscape for over a decade, known originally for coldset phone directories and now largely for heatset catalogue work out of the North Island town of Masterton. In Australia, Webstar is a major player in heatset printing, with magazine work focused mostly on niche titles (such as ProPrint, produced at its Silverwater hub). The ACP deal was something new, something big, and it promises to be the biggest shake-up the Kiwi magazine market had seen for a long time.
No doubt there’s an interesting tale to tell about the ins and outs of any contract negotiations between the country’s largest publisher, ACP, and printing powerhouses like Blue Star, PMP and APN. But there’s another story to be told. Here is a printer that had won a monumental magazine contract in a new market but didn’t yet have the capacity to service it. How did Webstar set up its NZ printing plant?
The ‘how’ of Webstar going live in Auckland has been a complex, multi-stage process, but the ‘why’ is easy to grasp. Look at Blue Star’s business – it’s no wonder the company is keen to grow its activity in the web publication market. Sheetfed has taken a battering over recent years. One reason Blue Star hasn’t taken quite the lathering of rival print group Geon is thanks to Webstar. No corner of the print industry is without overcapacity problems and competition, but the publication world is on steadier ground.
Even so, the character of the magazine world is changing. Long-run mainstream magazines are mostly suffering, while niche publications are stable – and often growing. Webstar’s Silverwater operation is geared toward these low- to mid-range volumes. It runs 16pp presses, more tailored to this market than the larger 36pp, 48pp and 64pp machines installed at other players in the magazine and catalogue world, such as PMP or IPMG. Where Webstar’s Australian set-up is suited to niche work, it is also ideal for the medium-run lengths of the mainstream publications read by our cousins 2000kms away in New Zealand.
Webstar Australia and New Zealand chief executive Warwick Hay says: “For the next decade, this is the model that will become more prevalent, even in Australia: more flexible presses doing reduced volumes. You just have to look at the big titles and the big runs – they are being hammered on circulations. The more targeted titles have held up well.”
Hay has been ultimately responsible for delivering this new plant – though he would quickly and strenuously point out that this has been a group effort. He had a clear vision of what the Auckland site would be, not just a Kiwi cousin to Silverwater but a twin brother.
“We already do work for ACP in Australia. The model we use in Australia is what we decided we would use in Auckland, so from ACP’s point of view they could understand what we wanted to do.”
From the get-go, the plan has been to match the configuration in Silverwater, while improving wherever possible. More than just a cultural model, it’s a technological mirror image, with automation at its core. Hay is proud of the automation already on show in Sydney. Now he had a chance, and the investment budget, to take it to the next level.
Strategy? Tick. Confidence from parent company borne out of strong performance? Tick. Belief from customer? Tick. But even if Webstar is a shining light in the Blue Star stable, ploughing millions into a new plant is not for the fainthearted. In these times of restrained investment, an example of setting up a new plant from scratch – and a high-volume web plant at that – is a rare occurrence. It takes equal amounts of confidence and cajones.
The lynchpin of any new web plant is – surprise, surprise – web presses. Silverwater runs a pair of four-colour Manroland Rotomans, a Polyman and a Heidelberg M850. A bevy of high-end finishing kit includes a Kolbus Publica perfect binder, Muller Martin Primera saddlestitcher and Ferag Unidrum gatherer-stitcher. The idea in Auckland was to match the pair of Manrolands, while leaving space for further investment if the need ever arose.
So Webstar put out word about its technology wish list, ideally a near carbon copy of its Sydney plant. The call was heard by New Zealand-based machinery reseller Richard Carr Graphics. Director Richard Carr has worked in the sector for many years. His experience with Manroland dates back two decades, and includes a stint working for the manufacturer in its German homeland.
He has been part of many of the biggest press installations in his native NZ, as well as worldwide. It was Carr who came across failed Swiss print house Weber Benteli. The magazine producer had fallen into the hands of administrators, and a pair of almost new Rotoman web presses were sitting idle in its multi-storey HQ near the capital city, Bern, along with a host of top-spec finishing equipment.
One upshot of the GFC is the glut of secondhand machinery on the market (Webstar isn’t the only NZ print site to have lucked out here – PMP is currently shipping over a new KBA web press picked up in a fire sale at a failed Mexican magazine printer). First, Webstar founder Noel Rogers and operations director Darryl Meyer headed to Switzerland to inspect the equipment and seal the deal. Then it was up to Carr and his team to begin the arduous process of extracting the kit from Weber’s multilevel facility.
“Everything was on a different floor. The presses were above the basement. The second floor was a Bolero perfect binder. The third floor was stitching,” says Carr.
But if craning presses out of different levels in a Swiss print shop wasn’t enough of a task, the work all had to be done in the depths of the Swiss winter. “It was a risk,” says Carr, not just because printing machinery and snowflakes don’t mix, but also in terms of logistics.
“If it starts to snow, you get issues at the shipping ports. When it snows, the ships can’t come in, and you have to change plans. But the more times you move containers, the more risk,” says Hay.
He’s not just talking about a couple of truckloads. The entire printing arsenal was broken down and fitted into no less than thirty-six 40-foot containers. The team used 4.5kms of timber and 200 slats of 2,500×1,200 wood panels to secure it all in place. Even with all the pieces pulled apart and packed separately, it was a heavy load. Fully assembled, each Rotoman came in at around 175 tonne. The ovens attached to the Rotomans were stripped as much as humanly possible to reduce the weight and they still came in at 20 tonnes apiece.
It has been a monumental endeavour. For Carr, the whole project lasted three months, between walking out the door of his house, clutching a return ticket to Bern airport, and arriving home again.
But back in New Zealand, the team was having success at finding a home for all this technology. Early on, they had decided to focus the search on Auckland. Along with Hay, the local team was led by Webstar New Zealand general manager Bernie Roberts, who has spent the past few years based out of Auckland and managing the catalogue plant in Masterton.
So why didn’t they look at bringing the existing web infrastructure in Masterton together with the planned magazine site?
Roberts says: “There are a couple of reasons to keep them separate. Time is critical in our marketplace. Having a high-quality magazine operation that is highly automated and focused on hourly scheduling requires a different focus and way of operating to catalogues, which are running on daily plans.”
There is a big gap between the quality requirements of a catalogue that appears in the mailbox and the kind of magazine a reader will part with their hard-earned cash at the newsstand. It’s a quality difference that doesn’t just exist in the minds of the end users, but must also inform a printer’s strategy.
When the team came across the 13,500m2 plant in the western suburbs of Auckland, they knew they were onto a winner. They won’t be the first team making business out of paper at the site. It had previously been a tissue factory operated at different times by Caxton Press, packaging giant Carter Holt Harvey and SCA Hygiene. The site’s long history as a production plant is still on show from the tracks that veer directly into the site from the railway line that passes behind its south-west wall.
Webstar won’t be using the railroads, but there were plenty of services that needed to be directed into the plant. After working with the landlord to lock down the lease, Webstar turned to one of its own to manage this complex project and tight timeline. Darryl Meyer is an 18-year veteran of heatset printing who has spent the past eight years at Silverwater. After inspecting the equipment in Switzerland, he took over as project manager. The first step was to set up all the utilities – power, water, gas and compressed air. Electricity is one area where the Auckland site has got one over on its Silverwater sibling.
Roberts says: “The power has really given us a step up compared with Sydney. We have our own transformer and were able to move it from the front to the rear of the site to put it closer to key equipment.”
In fact, ancillary systems have been at the forefront of the planning process. The chilled water system went in relatively early, and has enough capacity for an extra two presses, if there is ever a need. While the comparatively small size of the NZ market means it is unlikely Webstar is going to be looking for a new Rotoman any time soon, one of the major advantages of this blank-canvas build is the ability to future-proof operations. In this vein, the company has also installed an extra paper compacter, which adds redundancy as well as leaving room for any growth potential.
Beyond utilities, the vital step was readying this still empty warehouse for the arrival of all that heavy metal. The site had the perfect spot for the presses, but one big drawback: the area had previously held pallet racking for tissue products – which has very different load-bearing requirements to a couple of 175-tonnes presses. “When you bolt them down, they need to be very accurate,” says operations manager John Holmes.
To solve this, the team used experts from the UK who specialise in installing locating devices for presses. They sunk 60 24-metre i-beams vertically into the floor below the slab where the presses would stand.
So by December last year, the site was ready to welcome the machinery. The plant was all in hand, but there was still a missing piece of the puzzle – people.
Holmes was the first new starter to join the Webstar NZ fold. An experienced production manager whose CV includes time at PMP, Holmes was at the top of the Hay and Roberts’ staffing wish list. It wasn’t just about an applicant’s resumé, says Roberts. “It’s as much about the culture and the willingness as it is about the work. One thing we stressed throughout the interview process was flexibility.”
There are a number of reasons for that. The idea is for multi-skilled staff who are prepared to pitch in across different parts of the business if they need to. That’s essential when you’re planning to run a print shop as lean as this one will be. Automation is the watchword of the whole team. The presses are among the industry’s newest, featuring all the automation bells and whistles, which allows for a slimmed down staff list when.
“We’ll be a mirror of Silverwater, if not more efficient, and Silverwater is one of the least manned shops in Australia,” says Hay.
The machinery and manpower has met the team’s wish list, but no one could expect a challenge of this scale to go without a hitch. One fly in ointment came when APN decided to exit the NZ magazine printing market. Not only did it mean that all APN’s publishing work got sewn up in a 10-year deal with PMP, but Webstar lost APN as a trade supplier for overflow work while it was setting up shop in Auckland. It definitely added costs to the project, not least the need to ship magazines from Silverwater over to New Zealand.
Roberts says: “That was something we hoped to avoid but we had planned for it, although compromises had to be made. Bringing product out of Australia is expensive. Making sure we met our delivery commitments was the priority. To do this required extra freighting that in an ideal world we’d like to avoid.”
In general, ACP is not regarded as the easiest of clients – some might call it a hard taskmaster. Blue Star chief executive Chris Mitchell certainly doesn’t use these words, but says: “All customers are hard. ACP is a very sophisticated customer. But clearly we are happy with the overall economics of the investment otherwise we wouldn’t have put up significant capital to start the thing up.”
So it was to be a plant of half the staff – and one established in perhaps half the time a project manager might want. In terms of timeframe, Webstar has gone from the idea of a new magazine plant in September 2010 to pulling paper in March 2011 and printing the first commercial job in early April 2011.
The fact the new build mirrors Silverwater helped keep the planing on track, though the configuration isn’t an exact twin. For one thing, the Rotomans are five-colour units with fully automated materials handling post-press equipment. Ink is piped directly in like other web set-ups, but here each unit is hooked up to all five colours. It’s unlikely there will be huge demand to interchange colours beyond the typical CMYK, but it’s an admirable piece of future-proofing.
Webstar can’t know exactly what the future will hold. The ACP contract has been the catalyst to get the plant up and running, but there’s still plenty of capacity to fill. In terms of how much volume they are putting through Auckland, exact figures aren’t available.
Mitchell says: “I wouldn’t want to comment on the specifics because it
is a little bit commercially sensitive to tell people what capacity you have got. But we are obviously pleased to have ACP as an initial tenant for the facility. We have already made great progress with some other customers. In fact, we have secured some others.”
But for time being, the focus is on getting the plant up to speed. The Christchurch earthquake caused a few headaches – a component for the chilled water system was due to be delivered from the quake affected area, which set timelines back a week. It’s been a long slog, but as ProPrint went to press, the paper had been pulled on the first test runs and everything was pretty much on schedule.
“When you take on a situation like this and try to implement it, it is a huge strain because everyone has to take on more,” says Hay. “But I see that we are soon going to be printing magazines and I tell you, when that first completed magazine hits my desk, it will be my beer coaster for years to come. It will be the proudest moment of my career.”
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