V-TAB is the largest newspaper printing group in Scandinavia and has built a new major printing plant in Landvetter, Sweden. It has not only automated much of the actual management process at the plant, it has also automated how newsprint paper rolls are supplied to the printing presses. The new plant uses Rocla's automated guided vehicle system.

The main reasons why the company has decided to replace the manual trucks used in the old plant are the high reliability of AGV technology - automated trucks do not call in sick or have bad days - and its precision, which eliminates the risk of damage to the 1.5 tonne newsprint paper rolls.

Rocla's automated guided vehicles make paper roll handling safer and more effective in VTAB Printing house

These rolls are prone to suffer damage to their edges if they land awkwardly on the concrete floor; ovality if the clamping force is too strong; or they can slide inside their outer packaging if the clamping force is too weak. When the rolls are ordered from the main warehouse, forklift trucks with clamp attachments transfer them to a preparation station, where the rolls are centrally prepared for printing. The rolls that are ready for printing are then read in the central WMS, warehouse management system, also supplied by Rocla, for intermediate storage; the fetch order is then given to the automated trucks to transfer them to the intermediate warehouse for pre-prepared rolls.

"It is during the day that most of the intermediate warehouse is filled up, as this is when production is limited to the commercial production of advertising flyers," explains Hans-Åke Stjernman, System Engineer at V-TAB. "At night the automated trucks take the paper rolls to the printing presses - and this process needs to be quick!"

V-TAB prints four different kinds of newspapers with different colours (pink, white) and with different grammages which makes warehouse management more complicated. When changing over from printing one newspaper title to the next newspaper title, the paper rolls that have not been used are removed from the presses and are returned to the buffer warehouse using the automated trucks.
"The time-critical part of production is during the change-over between different newspaper titles. This is why we have set up a buffer warehouse close to the presses to shorten the time that the automated trucks take to discard rolls that have been used and to pick up the new ones," explains Hans-Åke Stjernman. "This saves us valuable time in production. Having a slight overcapacity in our intermediate warehouse saves us even more time."

"Other advantages of AGV technology include its precision and the careful way the rolls are handled. This enables us to prepare them into rolls that are ready for printing before they arrive at the printing press itself," continues Hans-Åke Stjernman. "It is easier to handle and take care of the transport packaging after it has been removed as we concentrate all of this work at one central preparation station rather than doing this right before we feed the rolls into each printing press. We also make better use of the paper content of the rolls as we avoid damage caused by manual truck handling."

There are enormous volumes of newsprint paper that passes through the printing plant, so AGV technology saves huge amounts of money as it will ensure that the rolls are handled carefully. Money is saved as optimum use is made of the rolls; the rolls do not have to be thrown away due to clamping damage and do not lose thousands of running metres due to damage to the edges.

Rocla's WMS system also helps to rationalise the administration of paper rolls coming into the main warehouse, as the warehouse balance is updated automatically by transmitting the loading manifest electronically in XML for the rolls coming from different paper mills.

For more information on Rocla's comprehensive AGV solutions please visit www.rocla-agv.com

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