manroland and KBA satellite units have been combined in an ambitious upgrade project for Swedish publisher V-TAB.

Headquartered in Göteborg, the group produces newspapers, inserts, magazines and other commercial products for Nordic countries with four coldset printing plants across the south of Sweden.

One of these is centred on a manroland Colorman installed in 2010 as part of a new printing facility in Landvetter (Sweden) which had been converted to shaftless by EAE but by 2016, needing attention to boost quality from its nine-cylinder Colorman satellite units.

Closure of a plant in Örebro which had three Koenig & Bauer Commander satellite towers presented the opportunity for the present project in which DCOS has mechanically installed the first of the KBA towers, ready for commissioning in early summer. After two weeks of intensive technical study and negotiations, the contract was signed and DCOS immediately assigned an engineering team to the project.

Managing director Mattias Andersson says this was the first time DCOS had executed a project this size at such short notice: "It´s obviously a huge challenge and the close proximity to V-TAB Landvetter was important. Four weeks after the contract signing, we started retrofitting hardware on the tower and another four weeks later we were running," he says.

Since the project began in April 2017, two identical towers have been installed, retrofitted and commissioned. In the next weeks the third and last tower will be commissioned. In addition, V-TAB has also decided to install DCOS's closed-loop density, register and cut-off control for the three KBA satellite towers.

V-TAB project manager Dan Eriksson says the relationship has turned into a huge success: "Not only did they help us keep our critical schedule in place, but they also brought our level of automation to a higher standard, with a full scale closed-loop system.

"We had a worry that two different control and operator systems on a single press could cause challenges for the operators, but the way DCOS implemented their system made this transition easy, and our operators are very pleased with the solution."

The final press layout includes is six manroland Colorman satellite towers, three KBA Commander satellite towers, two manroland folders and one KBA folder.