Current control technology has presented the opportunity to expand to physical capability of an existing press, virtually without mechanical modification.

That's the experience of the publisher of the Chronicle Herald in Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose single Wifag OF370 has recently been upgraded by ABB.

Production and facilities director Mike Murtha - a man who knows every nut and bolt of his press - also knows how to squeeze every last production possibility out of the configuration. The result of their partnership has been more flexible production with the ability to split folder output, something which was impossible when the press was installed 12 years ago.

Think Halifax, and you conjure images of swirling mists and the remote locations of author Annie Proulx' The Shipping News. And we're told, of the traditional lobster dinners enjoyed by ABB commissioning engineers in local restaurants.

Remote is to the point: The Herald depends on a single press - five reelstands feeding a 4/4 tower, two-colour and single-colour units, and a double folder - and interruption to the daily production was out of the question.

The largest independently-owned publisher in Canada, it produces the best-selling newspaper among the Atlantic Provinces, with its production and distribution facility outside the city among the forests and lakes that are so characteristic of the Nova Scotia landscape.

Beyond reliability and the long-term availability of parts, Murtha's objectives included opening up the opportunity to handle two independent productions, of which the folder was mechanically capable: "The original control system software did not allow this and has therefore restricted our production possibilities," he says.

"In addition, the one single section control system meant that one fault could bring our complete production capacity to a standstill. No production director needs that sort of stress."

The first phase of the project has been replacement of obsolete Wifag WPOS systems with ABB's APOS system on the towers and folder. Commissioning of the new control system then began last April, with ABB supplying not only the on-unit control systems but also three consoles, their MPS Production management system and production analysis systems.

New systems were installed in parallel - and had to work together - with those existing, with gateways between ABB's ethernet-based world and the old Arcnet-based communication, as well as the existing Indramat drives (which are to be replaced later). Previously missing redundancy at section control level was addressed with two separate section control systems, both of which could work with either of the two folder control systems, the latter enabling the two folders to operate independently of each other.

Initially the new systems - with the original system in parallel - were tested during a production-free time window between about 3am and 10 am, but progressively more and more work was run on the new systems. Two further phases are to follow: Drives are to be replaced in 2016, and the following year will bring the retrofitting of the controls and drives on the five reelstands.

Murtha says that while there were difficulties that had to be overcome in the course of the project, the commissioning team "always came up with the solution and we are delighted with the result".

He says it has been a real boost being able to run the two folders independently and knowing there is now redundancy in the system. "There is a string of other things that we couldn't do before," he says. "We can now properly preset web leads that use our self-made turner bar between the first two towers, the whole system is much more transparent from top to bottom and I'm getting all the production data that I need."