Automation’s operational and cost benefits are no longer reserved for large metro newspapers.

Scot Sherick

Increasingly, mid-sized newspapers are upgrading or replacing their equipment. As a result, adding automation to new or expanded facilities has become more prevalent in the middle market than ever before.

To that end, efficient and innovative facility planning has become even more critical because of its direct relationship to optimizing automation’s potential benefits.

Plan before buying

When planning or upgrading a facility, it’s important to understand how the overall production plan will affect the plant’s equipment. To avoid minimizing the equipment’s potential, the symbiotic relationship between equipment and the facility must be recognized.

To make that happen, consider the following:

• The specification and selection of process equipment must occur prior to the building design.

• The process, architectural and engineering design team must have a deep understanding of the equipment to be installed in terms of both functionality and requirements.

• The architectural team must establish a solid working relationship with the equipment vendor(s) and be able to communicate clearly.

To illustrate the importance of integrating equipment and facility planning, consider what happens when you allow the design of the facility to get ahead of the equipment selection process:

• Operational compromises will be made because the facility design cannot accommodate the optimum equipment solution.

• Expensive change orders, which also impact the overall schedule, are required to redesign the facility to accommodate equipment decisions.



Schematic showing addition of Journal Star’s production facility in Peoria, Ill.
Illustration: McClier

Both of these pitfalls are avoided when the design team has a good working knowledge of the equipment’s purpose and the team can incorporate that purpose into the overall process flow of the facility.

Forging a link

The importance of fostering a strong professional relationship between the facility design team and equipment vendors cannot be understated. While it is critical for the end user to participate in the process, it is not his role to act as a conduit between those designing the facility and those supplying the equipment.

When facility design is driven by the need to accommodate improved operational performance and increased equipment capabilities, the project is optimized.

Consider the following: Facility planning and design for The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel’s new office and production facility enabled the newspaper to build a fully automated packaging center. (Editor’s note: McClier designed all of the projects cited within this article.)

Process and facility design for the 180,000-square-foot facility was driven by equipment decisions that included:

• Computer-to-plate equipment

• Automated reel transport and loading system

• Single-copy gripper conveyor

• Inline print buffering system

• Online inserting

• Automatic palletization.

Space requirements altered

Original space requirements for the press bay area were reduced because the automated reel transport eliminated the need for a laydown area. Conversely, space requirements for the packaging area increased to accommodate the inline print buffering system and requisite storage disks. New inserting machines and the need to accommodate hopper loaders on either side of the machine had clear facility implications.

Finally, space for equipment, maneuvering room for material handling and appropriate dock area facilities were all design aspects to accommodate automatic palletization.

The Bucks County (Pa.) Courier Times, meanwhile, made its vendor selections during the initial design stages of its 80,000-square-foot production building. The newspaper bought CTP equipment, a single-copy gripper conveyor, an automatic bundle-wrapping system and made provisions for quarter-folding.

The Courier Times’ CTP deployment required careful analysis of space requirements to enable plates to flow to and from the press. Adding a quarter-folder to the presses’ single-folding structure added 15 feet to the overall length of the folder configuration, thus affecting clearances between the press and the control environment.

The newspaper’s decision to employ an outbound former actually reduced the cost of construction. The folder configuration — single former or multiple formers are placed outside the straight path of the web — is about 8 feet shorter than a more traditional three-high configuration.

This lets the Courier Times print more than four sections, or variable web, in a two-high former setup.

The newspaper’s decision to use an edge-grip, lap-stream conveyor for its secondary delivery provides more consistent stream quality than belt delivery. Moreover, the lap-stream is significantly less expensive than grippers and affords more flexibility in building design.

The daily’s automatic bundle-wrapping equipment had the greatest impact on the building’s design. The Courier Times opted for an automatic system to accommodate its youth-carrier distribution force as well as climate conditions.

Had the facility been designed before factoring in the bundle-wrapper, the plant’s distribution dock area might have been choked with the 9 linear feet the wrapper system added to the Courier Times’ stack/tie-line configuration.

Upgrades have own challenges

Of course, new facilities aren’t the only buildings that require careful integration.

Accommodating new equipment is even more challenging when architects and engineers are faced with expanding an existing facility.

Take the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. The newspaper wanted to enlarge its plant to add commercial stacking and two new inserting lines. Yet it also opted for all-in-one bundling technology, significantly reducing the overall footprint of the expansion.

If planning and floor plan provisions were not incorporated during the design phase, it would have been impossible to implement this approach.

That’s the same scenario faced by the Journal Star in Peoria, Ill. It plans to build an inline print buffer system, thus requiring more space for its packaging center.

This type of system would be very difficult — and costly — to shoehorn into existing operations and would likely pose an insurmountable challenge if it hadn’t been considered prior to the completion of the design phase.

Scot Sherick is senior technical director of McClier, an architectural and engineering design firm with offices throughout the United States. He can be reached by e-mail at scot.sherick@mcclier.com or 303.228.3067.