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Canada’s Graphic Communications Magazine

The New

Press Builder

Manroland Sheetfed CEO Rafael Peñuela Torres discusses

restructuring, modern machine manufacturing

and the road ahead

Nick Howard on the Tiegel’s century-long ride

What to consider when investing in inkjet

+heidelBerg’s

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October 2014 • $7.50

12 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2014

In late-July, I had the opportunity to interview Rafael

Peñuela Torres, Chief Executive Officer of Manroland

Sheetfed GmbH in Offenbach, Germany. A polyglot

born in Spain, educated in Economics in Germany,

and employed in the printing industry since 1992, Peñuela

took charge of Manroland’s Spanish organization in 1999.

By 2003, he was managing the company’s Western Eu-

ropean market and by 2006 Manroland Sheetfed sales

worldwide. Following Manroland Sheetfed’s takeover by

an British industrial conglomerate controlled by Tony

Langley, Peñuela Torres temporarily shared the role

of Managing Director of Service and Sales with a col-

league until 2013, when he became Manroland Sheetfed’s

sole CEO.

In our interview, Peñuela Torres, 54, candidly discusses

Manroland’s change of direction after its 2011 insolvency

and 2012 acquisition by Langley Holdings PLC. He de-

scribes several aspects of the company’s restructuring ef-

forts, working through Germany’s tough labour laws.

Peñuela Torres offers analyses of how dramatically the

offset equipment and printing markets have changed since

being hard hit by the global financial crisis of 2008. He

also divulges how Manroland Sheetfed’s research-and-de-

velopment division is currently adapting its printing

machines to meet a whole new set of customer needs

and expectations.

Victoria Gaitskell: What do you consider to be

the most important sheetfed-offset technology

your company has introduced over the past five

years or so – and why?

Peñuela Torres: For decades, Manroland has been leading

the development of new technologies for offset printing

– although not all these developments have been commer-

cially successful. For example, in 2000 we launched the DI-

COweb plateless press, enabling a digital changeover from

job to job in less than 10 minutes. It was amazing technol-

ogy for the time, but it was not a commercial success, be-

cause the cost was much too high.

In 2009, we developed the world’s largest perfector, the

Roland 900 XXL, to serve the demand for high-volume

book printing. It allowed offset printers to produce 64 A4

pages in one pass, enabling them to compete with web pro-

cess productivity.

But after commercial and editorial printers took a hit in

the 2008 financial crisis, the demand for this technology

was greatly reduced. Press productivity is only important

if customers have jobs for it. So some of our new devel-

opments did not succeed because of the wrong timing

or costs.

But many others were successful because they were ex-

actly what our customers wanted: In 2003, for example, we

built the Roland 500, the first press to print 18,000 sheets

per hour; and time has proven that this innovation in speed

was the right trend for our market.

We also launched an InlineFoiler that can print cold

foil in one pass on a conventional press. Although at first

it proved popular, it generated complaints that the process

wasted too much very expensive foil; so later we developed

an indexing function to reduce waste in the inline process

by up to 50 percent. This is an example of how we are try-

ing increasingly to generate value for our customers by

our technology.

Our innovations have not only taken the form of heavy

metal, but also the integration of software processes into a

single electronic workflow, as we achieved in our Printnet

network management system.

In 2006, we launched the Roland 700 DirectDrive. The

DirectDrive technology allowed customers to change plates

simultaneously while the press is washing the cylinders, al-

lowing for zero plate-changing time. Since then many of

our competitors have introduced similar technology, and

so far it forms the biggest step towards a significant reduc-

tion of make-ready time.

Peñuela Torres continues to discuss R&D…

PT: Among these successful technologies, I can’t identify

one single development as the most important; but I can

say that many of our recent developments have focused

on increasing automation and reducing make-ready time,

rather than on increasing press speed. One reason is that in

today’s world we have discovered that speed is not the issue

for our customers. The general trend is that run lengths are

becoming shorter, so increasing press speed does not really

help. A precondition for the improvements we introduce

now is not just that they satisfy our R&D people but that

they satisfy our customers.

Since 2008, it has been increasingly difficult for Man-

roland and our competitors to sell the same amount of

equipment we used to sell. The market has shrunk by 50

percent because print shops are disappearing or merging,

so less demand for machinery exists.

Customers are also running machinery for longer than

planned. The average age of a press now is 13 years, and our

customers’ requirements and business models are chang-

ing rapidly; so we are developing new technology like the

InlineFoiler in a way that allows customers to add it on

through upgrades or retrofits to get different or better value

out of their existing press.

In addition to shortening make-ready, another of our

R&D goals is to make it easier to handle a press by creat-

ing an easier interface with the user. Our customers are

finding it more and more difficult to obtain highly skilled

operators to run presses, because fewer of these operators

are available; so we are spending a lot of brainpower and

resources to make it easier to operate our technology. Espe-

cially because runs are becoming shorter, automation plays

a tremendous role.

The New Press Builder

by VicToria GaiTskell

Half of Manroland Sheetfed’s 1,800 employees work in the press maker’s Offenbach plant, while the other half are spread out across the printing world.

Rafael Peñuela Torres, CEO of Manroland Sheetfed, discusses restructuring, the state of the printing market, modern machine manufacturing and the road ahead

14 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2014

Since skilled labour is critical to the manufac-

ture of high-performance presses: What was the

size of the labour force in your three manufac-

turing plants before restructuring and what is it

now in your single plant after restructuring?

PT: You are correct – Skilled labour is crucial for press

manufacturers. Manroland decided years ago and con-

firmed under Langley its plan not to do any manufactur-

ing outside of Germany. One reason is that, although we

realize many skilled people work outside of Germany, in

other countries we find it more difficult to find the right

number of them with expertise in all the different disci-

plines we need to build a press.

In the insolvency, we lost 50 percent of our workforce.

Beforehand we had roughly 4,300 employees and we have

1,800 today. Of these, 900 work in the German factory and

the other 900 take care of our markets and aftermarket ser-

vices in various parts of the world.

How did you select which workers to keep and

which to downsize?

PT: I don’t know if you are aware of it, but German labour

laws require a company undergoing massive restructuring

to apply for approval on who goes and stays via a so-called

social plan.

The government works with unions to establish criteria

for this process. Workers are assigned points based on fac-

tors like seniority, age and family situation. Adding up the

points results in a pre-selection of employees who have to

leave the company. Because the point system gives prefer-

ence to older workers with seniority and families, normally

you have to ask younger people, sometimes with promising

talent, to leave the company – which happened in our case.

Sometimes, if you have certain workers with critical ex-

pertise, you can offer a successful argument here and there

to avoid the social plan and keep them on board. But we

had only a short time to discuss the plan with the union

and workers council during the last week of insolvency. I

don’t know if the results were right or wrong, but we tried

to do our best.

With a reduced workforce, how are you en-

suring your machinery continues to be of high

quality?

PT: We are still continuing to fine tune our human re-

sources management strategy after restructuring. Langley

was convinced that with our remaining capabilities we are

still able to keep our whole production portfolio. Not one

press was eliminated. This challenge has required us to

cross-train people who were specialists before. For exam-

ple, experts on 700 perfectors have also become qualified

to handle 500 perfectors.

It was quite a challenge, especially for the first six

months of 2012; but now we have a more flexible work-

force of people who can change from one model to anoth-

er on the production line and still maintain high-quality

standards. The employees say they are happy with the new

system, because they have acquired more skills and are do-

ing work that is more challenging and less routine.

In 2012, I was concerned that we would not be able to

manage the whole portfolio with a reduced workforce; but

in fact the presses we ship out today are costing less overall

after delivery. This fact proves that we have been able to

manage with half our original workforce and achieve an

even better result in terms of quality.

With restructuring behind you, what is the big-

gest challenge facing your company today?

PT: After the Langley takeover, our immediate challenge

was to serve customers as well as before, or even better, de-

spite having reduced resources. Even before then, the com-

pany had experienced different phases of restructuring,

but it was only because of the insolvency that we became

aware that our old culture and huge-corporation mental-

ity were responsible for the insolvency itself. We had be-

come too heavy, too bureaucratic, too self-confident that

we couldn’t fail, and too slow in managing, reacting to the

market, and responding to our customers.

Our new shareholder Tony Langley knew we needed

to change our attitude first. During the first year, he spent

three days a week helping to transform us into a mittel-

stand [German for middle-sized] company with a hands-

on attitude and quicker response times.

Now the biggest challenge is to keep this new culture as

part of our daily business and avoid falling back into the

old ways. Especially in the last two years, when profits have

been better than expected, it creates the expectation of go-

ing back to the good old days when salaries were higher

and expenses less controlled. It’s an issue I need to keep

an eye on.

Why should new sheetfed-offset presses con-

tinue to interest commercial printers in North

America, one of the world’s most mature print-

ing markets?

PT: Commercial printers in industrialized Western coun-

tries are in a different position than commercial printers

in China, India, and Latin America, where other electronic

media are still less widespread and print is still the main

transmitter of commercial messages. In North America

and other Western economies, the commercial sheet-

fed-offset print segment has suffered more since the 2008

financial crisis because it must defend its position against

electronic media and digital print.

But after 20 years, digital printing is still far from dom-

inating the market. It still represents one single digit of to-

tal printed volume, although the marketing noise is very

loud and gives the impression that digital is dominating.

In reality it will take years for digital to achieve a bigger

percentage than what they have today, because the cost per

copy is high for digital and many enhancements, such as

UV and foil coating, are not available in digital. I think for

many, many years sheetfed offset will remain the dominat-

ing technology. It may be less loud and less sexy, but for

sure it is the best way to print massive volumes of sheets

of cardboard or paper for packaging or commercial print.

When it comes to cost-per-copy for industrial volumes,

no method is cheaper. Today, we see Western commercial

printers finding new business models to stay in the mar-

ket or even grow by adding value to commercial print and

escape from the commodity print market. We see more

and more commercial sheetfed-offset printers who have

managed to find their own niche by focusing on a specif-

ic application, or way of adding value, or way of servicing

customers.

For example, sheetfed offset is still the most used meth-

od to print business cards, and it also lets printers develop

workflows to produce simple products for customers on

24-hours’ demand. So today’s successful business models

include Web-to-print production of business cards and

other simple products, printed with the highest efficiency

at an unbeatable price.

What is the best advice you can share with the

many small- to mid-sized commercial printers in

Canada who continue to rely on sheetfed offset

as their primary production process?

PT: I’m not the guy to give advice to printers. They are pro-

fessionals who know best what they have to do.

But one thing I know from observation is that it is cru-

cial for printers to identify and follow the right model for

their business. They need know what they can do better

than others.

Basically they have a choice between two ways of mov-

ing forward: One is to find a way to be different from

their competitors with a different product or a different

approach to customers through their services, response

time, flexibility of workflow, or other factors. The second

way is to achieve excellence by increasing productivity and

reducing the cost per copy; for example, by using a large

commercial press to produce large volumes with good or

good-enough quality. The right business model can be

either mass productivity or differentiation.

Rafael Peñuela Torres, Chief Executive Officer, Manroland Sheetfed GmbH.

Manroland R&D focuses on make-ready rather than press speed.

One of Manroland’s skilled German workers prepares a 900 press unit.