By Chuck Moozakis
Editor-in-Chief

Merging newspaper production systems made by rival vendors is a little like getting on a freeway with a ’67 Volkswagen bus. Production managers know they’ll make it, but they also expect some heart-stopping moments along the way.

Systems integration is a growing challenge to newspapers adding new technologies to their production infrastructure. Whether it’s something as confined as meshing two circulation management applications together, or as complex as commissioning a new pressline, newspapers know that getting some systems to play nicely with one another is easier said than done.

“It’s a big challenge,” said a production executive at a large media group who declined to be identified. “We usually try to hire the vendors themselves (see related story, page 23) to do the integration but we still have to confront these issues,” she said.

Yet, vendors aren’t necessarily the panacea. Proprietary software and, in some cases, supplier intransigence can make it doubly frustrating for newspapers to lasso disparate systems together.

“It’s the nature of the business,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of toolkits available, and not all vendors have the code that will support other systems.”

What the paper needed

But that’s exactly what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel required when it began planning its new $110 million production facility, slated to be fully operational this month, said Ken Kieck, senior vice president of production.

Systems integration “is something we spent a lot of time on,” he said. The paper’s new facility, built around a KBA Commander pressline, boasts myriad systems developed by dozens of rival suppliers — many of which have to work together.

To make sure there were as few bumps as possible, Kieck and other key Journal Sentinel executives sat down with their key vendors in late 1999, months before the first spade-full of dirt was turned on the West Milwaukee site.

“Taking advantage of the automation [built into the new systems] was essential and that required interfaces to be built ahead of time,” Kieck said.

The paper (daily, 242,234; Saturday, 232,652; Sunday, 434,023) subcontracted as much of the work as possible to KBA and ABB, which provided the press control software.

“This eliminated finger pointing,” said Kieck. “We had a substantial amount of vendor participation and we let our expectations be known.”

Monthly meetings

The paper held monthly meetings with KBA and ABB reps to make sure plans stayed on track, said Dave Rappley, the Journal Sentinel’s production systems director.

“We had to develop some custom workflows. When we first sat down to talk about [the new plant] some of the systems we wound up using didn’t even exist back then.”

Ultimately, the paper and its key suppliers concocted an integration strategy that harnessed key systems under a single umbrella, Rappley said. Among the outcomes was a custom application that was aimed at letting the newspaper keep web rolls flowing through the Commander’s split-arm reel configuration.

“We all agreed the interface was needed,” Rappley said, describing the application that let the press communicate with Jervis B. Webb automated guided vehicles in order to ensure consistent delivery of newsprint.

Still other custom applications were written by other suppliers, such as Agfa unit Autologic, in order to automate some front-end work, he said.

“Looking back, it all worked out well,” Rappley said.

Green field helps

Although the integration challenges facing the Journal Sentinel were formidable, the paper was aided by the fact it was installing new systems across the board. That enabled the paper’s managers to tap into management software equipped with the application programming interfaces necessary to allow disparate programs to communicate.

For newspapers such as The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill. (daily, 57,384; Sunday, 66,708), integration efforts have been thwarted in part by legacy systems that don’t warrant the investment necessary to link them to other systems.

“We are exploring how to get systems to work together, but have a bottleneck,” said Bob Swoboda, packaging and distribution foreman. The culprit: inserter equipment that continually jams.

“The idea is to get our state and city editions off the press and automatically insert, stack and go from there,” he said. “But it doesn’t make sense to integrate [until the inserter is replaced by newer equipment].”