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Lyle Printing Tackles Problems of Wasted Ink, Wasted Time"
From Our Print EditionBy Elise McKeownSalem, Ohio -- Publishers are painfully aware of how expensive waste is -- materials and time -- waste that can't be avoided as they print newspapers, magazines and circulars. As the price of newsprint seems to go only up, and as readers would rather read publications in color, not black and white, the only way to cut costs is to reduce waste. Lyle Printing and Publishing tackled the problem of waste by installing a new press at its Salem web printing facility, part of an equipment upgrade it began last year."It was time," offers Scot Darling, chief operating officer for Lyle and publisher of its weekly newspaper, Farm and Dairy. Lyle bought the press used 10 years ago, some of its components are 20 years old.In a process called "a top-half removal," Lyle's eight press units were removed, leaving the frame, and replaced them with new parts. Price tag of this phase of the upgrade was $300,000, bringing the total bill for all improvements at the facility to $600,000.The new equipment is "more productive, more efficient," Darling says, saving the company time and money, and producing less scrap. It isn't necessarily faster than the old, Darling explains, but there's less start-up time, hence less scrap. Press operators are also reporting better overall ink distribution on the page sooner and less ink consumed, he says.Lyle employs 35 full-time and part-time staff runs between 20 and 25. When the press starts up, the pages are completely black with ink, then the images begin to appear, explains the commercial printing sales manager, Janet Welch. "When you're printing something in four-color you're probably throwing away at least 2,000 [copies] before you have the ink set." The new equipment brings the images up more quickly so fewer copies are thrown away."Time is a big issue around here," Welch says. "We have something on the press every day. Tuesdays we print Farm and Dairy. The other days we try to fill our presses with commercial work."Operation of the press remains unchanged, reports Randy Culler, web operations manager, but the new one is easier to run in certain ways. "You're not breaking down," he says, which results in less maintenance on the equipment and less wasted time for employees. The new press also produces a "better quality print," says Culler, at Lyle 15 years.The unit has "given us a cleaner, crisper look," Welch agrees. "Our look is cleaner than I've seen it for years. We have no little inking problems. Nothing." The half-tone reproduction of photos has improved greatly as well, Welch says. "When you're printing a half-tone, you have a lot of shades of gray. We seem to have more shades of gray so the detail is better," she says. "That's something every newspaper struggles with."For three years, Lyle has been printing Mahoning Matters, the Mahoning County Soil and Water Conservation District's quarterly publication distributed to every resident in Mahoning county. With the new press, says the conservation district's program coordinator, Sue Smith, the district is getting a better product for its money. "It's phenomenal, the difference in the pictures," Smith says. "Everything's nicer and sharper." The words on the screens (an area of the publication printed with a lighter shade of ink) are also more legible, Smith says.The new press completes the upgrade started with the installation of a quad-stack unit in January 2003. With a normal four-color press, the page travels four to five feet from one unit to the next, picking up color as it proceeds. Pages on the new quad-stack unit at Lyle travel a matter of inches to pick up the next color, "so the registration's very tight and it ends up with a nice, clear four-color," Welch says.The company's commercial customers, not just the advertisers in Farm and Dairy, prompted Lyle to improve its four-color printing. "We are getting more demand for four-color advertisements in our publication," Darling says, and commercial clients wanted it, too. "There have been accounts that we've kind of shied away from them because we didn't feel we could offer them the quality they expected," Welch says. "Now we have that capability.""We also want to present a colorful, clean-looking, four color front page to attract the eye," Darling says, which will draw buyers at the newsstand and lend itself to more commercial applications.The web press is a versatile piece of machinery, Welch says, because this one piece of equipment can put out three different products: tabloids, metro-style papers, and booklets and catalogs. The press can run 15,000 imprints per hour. Contact Elise McKeown at [email protected]"