Value-added printing
Putting value
back into print
T
he 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 floors, music, a
light show… and the first manroland 700
press in the country. The launch was a
great success, representative of another
time when business was more relaxed and
marketing dollars flowed 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 first 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 floor.
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 flimflam and glamour
of the first 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
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climate when offset investment is hard to
come by, the fortunes of the company rest
squarely on demonstrating the benefits of
value-added printing.
Not just a press maker
According 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 figures 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 flagship 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
Anyone can do CMYK, fourover-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 differentiate from the
mass of low-value print flooding
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
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 ‘first’
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
offset presses
According 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 finer 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
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Value-added printing
complete, with every size press, from
the A3 format Roland 50 up to the 64page 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 technologytransfer 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
office, 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 profile. What DirectDrive
does with its two-clutch system is do
three things at the same time.
Not a foiling press
But 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 first extraordinary facet of the
technology —foiling is used as a base
under the finished print, not as it is usually
done, offline on top of the print. It is, in
Kenney’s words, “not a foiling process but
a radical new printing process.”
The first printing unit lays down
adhesive ink (glue) to the required foil
design onto the substrate via a normal
litho plate process. Passing under the first
tower the foil is transferred to the areas
with the adhesive image. As the foil is
rewound, the sheet enters the first 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 finished stack, get missed in the
bindery process, in quality control and
end up on the customer’s delivery dock.
“Most importantly, it eliminates
LEFT: “Take a look at this!” Tony
Kenney with an inline foiled sheet
straight from the press.
RIGHT: The players on the night:
(left to right) Dr Markus Rall,
director manroland Germany, Sam
and Charles Hanna of Hannapak
and Steve Dunwell, managing
director, manroland Australia.
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 five levels
of sensitivity that can be selected.”
What printers will do
For 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.” O
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