Rainer Wiegard, Finance Minister of Schleswig-Holstein (left) and Nils Albrecht, Member of PAV management, start the new printing press from Muller Martini with the symbolic push of a button.

Paul Albrechts Verlag (PAV) owes its existence to typical Prussian virtues. Company founder Paul Albrecht was the administrator who compiled guidelines for optimizing administration. He founded a publishing company in Stolp, Pomerania in 1925 in order to publish these guidelines. A new start in Sandesneben (Schleswig-Holstein) followed after the Second World War, and the printing plant was moved to its current location in Lütjensee in 1956. Today, together with its subsidiary, PAV Card, Paul Albrechts Verlag employs a total of 270 people, 17 of whom are trainees. The two companies are in the third generation of family ownership.

In early March, 2006, the company commissioned a new, eight-color Concepta series offset press, with a web width of 20-1/2” (520 mm). At the official inauguration, which was celebrated just two months later at a customer event attended by approximately 200 guests, the press was already producing around the clock, five days a week. As PAV CEO Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing. Nils Albrecht expressed, the investment was almost overdue for web printing. The machine that the Muller Martini Concepta replaced had already seen more than 20 years of service in Lütjensee. The replacement installation is intended to strengthen PAV’s direct mailing business segment in particular. Nils Albrecht cites four significant decision-making criteria from Paul Albrechts Verlag choosing a model from Muller Martini for the first time: Technology, service, printing quality and supplementary equipment.

The Concepta’s printing units are equipped with a powerful ink unit and achieve a quality level that is comparable to sheetfed offset printing.

Establishing Its Own Company for Plastic Cards Manufacturing
A look back into Paul Albrechts Verlag’s recent history explains why there have been few investments in new web offset presses of late.  “The purely forms printing business has been a declining market for years. If the company had not been able to establish new pillars of support in addition to forms printing, there would have been drastic consequences,” says Nils Albrecht. Health insurance certificate books were an important product area at Paul Albrechts Verlag in the past. The family company responded quickly to the conversion to the health insurance card in the 1990's.  In 1991, the company ‘PAV Card’ was founded as a subsidiary, achieving a successful entry into plastic card manufacturing. As a result, investments focused primarily on the company expansion, as well as starting in-house production with a newly configured plant. Today, PAV Card supplies about 20 million people in the Federal Republic of Germany with their health insurance cards.

A continued downturn in the use of forms is expected for the future, as forms are gradually replaced by intelligent card systems. An example is the new electronic health card (eGK) which PAV Card is involved in developing. In addition, the company is also active in another market with future-oriented perspectives: the field of transponder technology.

Furthermore, PAV Card profits from widely varied experience in the handling of data in the company’s ancestral field of printing. Mailing production, which PAV views as a growth market and which will be accelerated for the company with the installation of the new Concepta, includes a share of data handling. A whole department in Lütjensee is dedicated to the preparation of addresses, postage optimization, duplicate reconciliation, bar code reading, etc.

Future-Secure Printing Technology
The printing tests in the demonstration center in Maulburg, where the Concepta left a good impression, had considerable influence on the decision to invest with Muller Martini. The control system played an important role for Nils Albrecht: “Because we are currently working on completely networking the printing plant, integration of the printing press into the internal company network must be guaranteed. That is the case with the Concepta, as it can be integrated into our workflow via the CIP4 standard." Muller Martini was also able to provide additional advantages in the area of processing assemblies. The sheeter demonstrated in Maulburg, with integrated QS52 destacker, did not fail to impress during high production speed tests.

With the Concepta, PAV is achieving printing quality on a level equal to sheetfed offset printing. This is due to the powerful printing unit of the Concepta, whose ink unit is equipped with three form rollers and temperature-controlled oscillating rollers. This results in stable ink coverage over the entire speed range, up to the maximum production speed of 305 m/min. Because the new printing line is intended to cover the high-quality mailing market segment in particular, such as mailings from branded article or mail-order companies, the finishing area is correspondingly well-equipped. All types of perforation, punching, die-cutting, etc. can be implemented.  And, the use of magnetic cylinders and die-cut plates enable quick changeover.

Klemens Ehrlitzer (freelance specialized journalist)