A complex press update project at V-TAB's newspaper plant in Landvetter, Sweden will see EAE unifying press controls.

The top Nordic printing group operates six printing centres in Sweden, with 120 people at Landvetter, where there is an eight-tower, three folder manroland Colorman press. Three towers - manufactured in 1987 - are nine-cylinder satellite units, while the other five are ten-cylinder satellites built in 2001.

The production portfolio mainly includes dailies including Göteborgs-Posten, Nya Lidköpings Tidning, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet, Halland Posten and Hallands Nyheter. The site also prints marketing materials for the Coop supermarket chain and sporting goods retailer XXL, with average daily print volume about 300,000 copies.

Technical director Dan Eriksson says they are increasingly frustrated by quality problems with the old printing units: "We desperately need to take action to avert the mechanical failures that will otherwise be inevitable. The aim of this retrofit is to raise the quality benchmark and restore the reliability of our production equipment."

EAE will equip an additional, yet-to-be-installed nine-cylinder KBA Commander tower from a V-TAB plant in Örebrothat has been closed down, and include it in the manroland line. It will be connected to the Colorman's existing EAE control system which includes five consoles, and EAE Print production planning and presets will be upgraded at the same time.

EAE relocated and retrofitted the Landvetter Colorman - bought secondhand from Stockholm - from 2007-2009. Eriksson says it "made sense" to work with EAA again.

Work on the additional tower takes place in the first half of 2017, with two further upgrade steps yet to be assigned for 2018 including replacement of the older seventh and eighth towers of the existing Colorman press with two newer KBA Commander towers from Örebro.

Pictured: (from left): Horst-Walter Hauer (project manager, Hauer IBH Engineering), Erwin van Rossem (QI/EAE head of sales), Dan Eriksson and Jarl Söderqvist (Piculell, QI/EAE's Swedish agent)