Traditionally, inserts have been inserted by hand at Poligrāfijas Grupa Mūkusala. After commissioning a new heatset press in 2006, the (semi-)commercials, magazines and pre-printed sections experienced rapid growth until the current economic downturn took effect, which is not surprising given that Mūkusala produces 25 newspapers, mainly tabloid size distributed throughout Latvia and neighboring Lithuania and comprising nine dailies, eleven weeklies and five periodicals.

Director Visvaldis Trokša: “The excellent training and the valuable tips provided by Muller Martini have enabled us to quickly improve our production processes.”

No More Hand Work

“To enable the short production time slot between 7 pm and 2 am to continue, we have replaced hand work with an automatic inserting system,” explains Director Visvaldis Trokša, who is also Chairman of the Board for the Association of Latvian Printing Companies (LPUA).
Visvaldis Trokša goes on to say that the decision to acquire the ProLiner with five stations was also influenced by the fact that the company’s experience of Muller Martini has been positive in the past, having previously commissioned a BravoPlus saddle stitcher. “The ProLiner project was also handled professionally by our partner. We particularly appreciated the excellent training and the valuable tips, which have enabled us to quickly improve our production processes. And if ever we have a problem, Muller Martini is swift off the mark to provide a solution.”

The ProLiner is used both in-line and offline by the printing plant, which is Latvia’s second largest with 91 employees and was founded in 1994. “We use it offline, particularly at low speeds,” explains Production Manager Sergejs Belouss. “The products are conveyed to the Forte stacker (which we also use for newspapers) before they are inserted in the ProLiner.”

The ProLiner newspaper inserting system is used both in-line and offline at Mūkusala.

Compacto and BravoPlus

In contrast, the Muller Martini Compacto rotary trimmer operates invariably in-line. Since some of the numerous magazines and promotional flyers with print runs between a few thousand and 47,000 copies are increasingly being produced for the export market, the rotary trimmer is used to perform three-sided trimming. “One particularly significant advantage of the Compacto is the high cycle time,” explains Sergejs Belouss, “it is completely up to the job of handling the output of our new printing press, which generally runs around the clock.”

High-quality magazines printed for Mūkusala’s own publishing company and for other publishers, and also exported to Scandinavia in some cases, are processed on the BravoPlus saddle stitcher with six feeders, a merchandise tipper, a Robusto stacker and a film wrapping station with shrink tunnel. Because the saddle stitched products increasingly contain inserts, Mūkusala commissioned an Onyx/Rubin inserting and film-wrapping line two years after the BravoPlus was brought into play.