Every Printing house is sooner or later faced with the decision: retrofit or new investment? Basically, almost any existing press, independent of age or manufacturer, can be transformed into such a condition that it meets current customer expectations. The most significant benefits of a retrofit are obvious: it secures the press availability of the existing system for many years to come and it reduces operating costs, thanks to improved spare part availability. And it doesn't always have to be a comprehensive and expensive retrofit. manroland Goss has developed solutions as part of its Smart Retrofit Solutions program which makes it possible to upgrade individual sub-areas or to raise them to current state-of-the-art technology. The team of experts accurately determine what fits the business model best in each separate case, through individual consultation sessions.

Retrofits keep printing presses "young" and equip them for the future demands in the print business. On the one hand they increase press availability and service life, and on the other hand they bring automation up-to-date, technologically. If the availability of older technology can no longer be guaranteed, but at the same time efficiency must be increased, then a retrofit is the correct decision. It leads to higher production quality and fewer downtimes in that the technical equipping of the system is modernised.

In the shrinking newspaper markets, development is naturally tending more towards retrofits. Fusions of Printing houses seem to be a daily occurrence. Thereby the willingness to invest in a press with a twenty year production cycle per se, is correspondingly limited. A very popular retrofit, which has become established on the market in this regard, is the replacement of old electrical components and simultaneously the installation of a modern diagnostic or reporting system.

However the complete upgrade does not have to be carried out all in one go. A large retrofit is also a certain investment and sometimes it is enough to make sub-areas fit for the coming years, step-by-step. This is where the Smart Retrofit Solutions model from manroland Goss comes in because it is oriented towards all Newspaper houses that are planning in shorter cycles. Smart Retrofits can be, for example, the virtualisation of the PPM Server or the control console, including the adoption of the latest control console screens and functions coming from new press business instead of a complete replacement of Hardware, a step-by step DC drive retrofit instead of re-equipping the entire system in one go, the possibility to re-equip the unit controller assembly unit by assembly unit according to the customer's wishes or (and this is the latest from the house of manroland Goss) a retrofit of the Siemens Masterdrive MotionControl drive technology, which is currently being redesigned for partial retrofits, enabling a significantly more economic upgrading.

These and many more smart "Anti-Aging" offers as well as the consistent development of solution methods tailored to individual customer requirements make manroland Goss todays Number 1 specialist in newspaper printing.

Would you like more information on our comprehensive retrofit solutions? Contact us at info@manrolandgoss.com or browse through our Newsroom.