Commissioning at Cox Target Media Inc.’s $200 million Valpak production center in St. Petersburg, Fla., began last month, representing the beginning of the end of a four-year project to redefine how the direct marketer prints and distributes its familiar blue envelopes.

Upon the formal opening of the mammoth plant, expected early next year, the Valpak facility will produce 20 billion coupons each year, packaged and mailed in more than 500 million envelopes.

Photo: CTM
Cox Target Media’s Valpak production plant opened last month, with full operation scheduled early next year.
 

CTM in 2003 tapped Chuck Blevins & Associates to help it re-engineer the manufacturing process and determine equipment requirements and supplier interfaces. The equipment layout designed by CBA became the foundation for the 470,000-square-foot plant designed and constructed by The Austin Co. The facility will replace CTM’s older plants in Largo, Fla., and Elm City, N.C., and more than doubles the direct marketer’s existing production capacity, said Bill Disbrow, CTM’s president and chief executive officer.

Payoff in 7 years

“The project is ambitious, but the demand in our industry is such we expect the investment to pay for itself in six or seven years,” he said.

Automation is a key ingredient of the plant, he said, with systems engineered to allow CTM to dramatically compress its current production timetable.

Indeed, said Jim Sampey, executive vice president of operations, where Valpak now requires four days to create a customer’s product, that process will shrink to only four hours — a impressive reduction in time.

“This is such a dramatic business change for us,” he said. “Our current production process has been in place for three decades. Over the years, as volume grew, we simply added more people. Our technology and equipment didn’t change very much. An individual coupon may be handled and moved as many as a dozen times before it left our plants. We were getting to the point where, the more we sold, the less efficient we were getting to be.

“In our new facility, from the time paper feeds into the printing press, until the postal carrier takes the blue envelope, no human hand will touch a coupon.”

CTM tapped a number of vendors to equip the plant, which is anchored by two Sunday 4000 web offset presses from Goss International Corp.

Each press, roughly the length of a football field, can produce high-quality, 4-color printing at 100,000 iph. The machines are engineered for continuous operation and zero makeready, thanks to eight automatic transfer printing units that allow operators to prepare idle  units for a new job while the other units are printing.

Each press also has a folding deck, supplied by East Greenwich, R.I.-based Foldex Corp., which converts the web to signatures. The 77-inch web allows each press to print 88 coupons per signature while inline finishing eliminates separate cut and fold requirements.

CTM will run the machines six days a week, 24 hours a day, with Sunday earmarked for maintenance.

All told, the machines can produce up to 54 billion coupons annually.

CTM expects to consume about 20 truckloads of paper per day, with the 7,000-pound rolls shuttled to the presses through systems designed by Automatic Handling International Inc.

On the prepress side, CTM selected thermal computer-to-plate systems from Kodak and a plate management and handling system from Burgess Industries Inc.

Postproduction is built around equipment from Muller Martini, Bowe Bell & Howell, CMC and Daifuku America Corp.

Muller engineered a press delivery system consisting of a Floorveyor inline deserting unit, Topveyor overhead conveyors and 12 PrintRoll twin winding stations. Press delivery is controlled by Muller Martini software that supports CIP4’s JDF and JMF protocols for automatic job delivery and job messaging, respectively.

Auto-transfer every 12 minutes

The software will track all of the 12 signature streams delivered from the two presses and also communicate to the press to automatically transfer printing to the idle units. The system is designed to support an auto-transfer every 12 minutes.

Nine collators, provided by BB&H in partnership with Italian wrapping and document feeding vendor CMC, process the coupons, flyers and other materials. The systems can produce up to 16,000 sealed Valpak envelopes per hour. Addresses are applied via an inline inkjet system, and an automatic postal tray loading system shuttles the completed envelopes to the correct repository.

Materials are stored in an eight-story ASRS manufactured by Daifuku. Four robotic cranes move at speeds in excess of 7 MPH to retrieve the thousands of pallets stored in the 200,000-square-foot area.

The systems’ disparate control software was stitched together by Bristlecone Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based consultancy that specializes in supply chain applications.

Stan Richmond, vice president of operations at Cox Newspapers Inc., said the plant adheres closely to the key design principle of “form follows function.”

“Increase capacity and improve timely delivery; that was our primary mission,” he said.

“Valpak’s a growing business and we outstripped our current production capacity. We always try to move forward and employ state-of-the-art techniques. The folks at Valpak are doing a great job."