Nørhaven, Denmark’s only industrial book manufacturer, has embraced the future of automation in prepress with the installation of a Robotic Plate Loader from ECO3.
Located in Viborg city in central Jutland, Nørhaven A/S produces around 30 million books and booklets each year. Export accounts for around 85% of the annual turnover, with the majority going to customers in Germany, England, Norway, and the Netherlands. Demand is currently high, a trend that looks set to continue.
"Overall, we have found that the book market has stabilized. We were expecting a dip in sales after the busy Christmas season, but fortunately it seems that the demand for book printing has continued into 2024. We are, of course, very pleased with this situation", explains Villy Aalbæk, CEO - Nørhaven A/S
Large capacity with challenges in prepress
The 30 million books and covers are produced on six long-grain (wide web) offset presses and two sheeters, using coldset and heatset technologies to print mainly in monochrome, but also in two and four color. Between 200 and 300 Adamas printing plates are needed on a daily basis, with up to 500 plates produced at peak times.
The plates are exposed on two Avalon N16 CtP systems from ECO3. One of Nørhaven’s biggest challenges is that it operates with six different plate formats. Both systems have so far been equipped with cassettes with up to 60 plates loaded in each format. When changing formats, the cassette had to be swapped. This meant a lot of running between the prepress department on the first floor of the administration building and the CtP department located in the press hall.
Another challenge was the loading itself. The plates had to be lifted off the pallet and placed in a cassette. With 200 plates going through the systems each day, that amounted to handling some 73,000 plates manually every year. Prepress Operator Ole Jørgensen calculated that this was equivalent to four weeks’ worth of work annually for one full-time staff member.
With the manual handling of materials came the risk of errors or damage. Plates might be scratched accidentally or the paper not removed properly on every plate, etc. A number of steps were therefore introduced to avoid errors caused by human intervention.
Adding value with automated plate handling
To solve the issues, Nørhaven has invested in a robotic solution from ECO3, a medium-sized loading arm that can handle different sheet formats with ease, including the largest at 1277 x 1027 mm.
Having replaced the cassette system, the Robotic Plate Loader picks plates from different pallets. First, it uses suction to lift off the plate, then it turns the gripper head 180 degrees and grabs the interleaf paper. The paper is discarded in a pallet box next to the conveyor. The robot then drops the plate onto the conveyor, which transports it into the CtP system.
Thanks to the integration with ECO3’s Apogee PlateMaker software, the robot picks the plate size needed without interrupting production. With a capacity of 1,200 plates per pallet, replenishment is required only after almost a week of production. Additionally, the pallets can be easily moved using a forklift.
According to Michael Boeriis, Sales Manager at ECO3, the robotic solution costs about the same as a PlateLoader, but the flexibility is much greater. The robot can handle multiple plate formats without manual intervention and is fast enough to service two CtP systems simultaneously.
For Nørhaven, it is clear that the ECO3 Robot Plate Loader has been the right solution to its prepress challenges, bringing added value, both in terms of efficiency and in the working environment.
