At the age of 24, Rob McGillis walked into Komori Canada for a list of Toronto-area companies using the same brand of press he had been operating for the last five years in Montreal. He had just moved to Toronto and, a few days later, Komori would hire him as a press demonstrator and, eventually, as a bilingual salesman. He was suddenly witness to worlds colliding, caught in transition, as the craft he learned from the guys coming off 4-colour manual presses gave way to the printing advances of push-button automation. In 1997, McGillis began selling presses in Canada for MAN Roland and was given typical new-guy territories that kept him boxed in. As time crept along, he began to hear more and more about a German-based press manufacturer called Koenig & Bauer AG (KBA) moving into the North American printing scene. By the Print 01 tradeshow in Chicago, KBA’s advanced Rapida 105 press clearly made many competitors nervous. Impressed with the technology, McGillis recognized opportunity and made an agreement with the 63-year-old, Wisconsin-based salesman looking after Canada for KBA. Now at age 42, McGillis is loaded with potential and opening up the Canadian market for KBA with such high-profile deals as the 64-inch Rapida 162A at PLM Group and the more recent 81-inch Rapida 205 at Annan & Bird. PrintAction spoke with McGillis to better understand the emerging force of KBA in this country.
PrintAction: When did KBA begin its rise in North America?
McGillis: KBA Europe is the oldest printing press manufacturer on the planet. In 1991, the Berlin Wall came down and they purchased Planeta, an East German press manufacturer, retooled that factory just outside of Dresden and began manufacturing Rapida presses there.
KBA North America was founded pretty much at the same time and they concentrated on packaging companies, primarily because packaging companies wrote cheques for their presses. It was very high volume, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week of running a machine and this is the way in which KBA manufactures and supports a press.
Why is KBA becoming more interested in the commercial printing market?
Ralf Sammeck, who worked for the Karat division, was groomed by KBA to take the position of CEO in October 2002. The mandate was to grow the business using the advantage we have in technology and expose it to the commercial market. That market is not getting any bigger and it is getting harder and harder for printers to be profitable. So the more that they can print, the more substrates they can print on, and say, ‘Yes’, to their customers, then the more they will be successful.
This is good for us because there are some unique aspects of our technology that allow moving from thin to thick stocks with virtually no manual adjustments in the machine. Today, commercial printers need to branch out, to print on plastic or thicker stocks, label or maybe foil stock – 60 percent of the machines we sell now have hybrid UV drying on them.
How is the growth strategy working?
We are still a well kept secret in North America. Throughout all of Europe, KBA is a very prominent player. Our focus is printing presses. Ninety-five percent of the world’s currency is printed on KBA equipment and with printers, this really is the highest end of the business. We build 4.5-metre-wide rotogravure machines, newspaper webs, commercial webs, intaglio – we are a printing press manufacturer. There is a tremendous amount of potential in KBA.
When Ralf took over, we were about a $75 million company and we have more than doubled that in three years. And it is all because of our thrust into the commercial market with large-format technology, where certain printers have economic benefits of going to a 56- or 64-inch press as opposed to a long perfector.
What has KBA done to advance Computer Integrated Manufacturing?
The CIM aspect comes into play first of all in marketing because it is interesting to talk about. Reality is that I think all printing press manufacturers have that ability now. But until the job is at the press, and you see what form it is, fine-tuning still takes place. GATF put out a paper saying – I don’t know the exact number – there are 100 things that can affect print quality. Basically, it showed offline makeready systems, or CIP4, only takes care of about 20 percent of them. You still need an operator.
So really the thrust and the profitability of a printer is to get on and off really quickly, and to minimize waste. In short run shops it’s about makeready. In long run shops it is the speed of the sheet. Our newest [Rapida]105 introduced at drupa 2004 takes care of both areas. It is an 18,000-sheet-per-hour machine that has eliminated the side guide, which is a huge technological advantage.
Why is it important to remove the side guide?
The side guide is a moveable part and it is one of the aspects affecting quality. The side-lay pulling machine needs to be maintained and it needs be adjusted on each and every job you run. It is just one of the aspects that you need to monitor. Removing it eliminates the potential for mis-register. To get a side-lay to pull a sheet at 18,000 an hour, because the machines are running so fast today, it has to work very quickly and it is going to wear out.
This innovation comes from KBA’s web [offset press] alignment technology where machines run 70,000 impressions an hour. Your sheets are being aligned from a servomotor on the in-feed register, so it automatically aligns back to a known zero point and fine tunes. There is a bit of a technological explanation, but it is a forward-thinking innovation like the rest of the 105.
How is KBA different from other press manufacturers?
R&D dollars – where you put your innovations. I think it is safe to say that KBA is at least two years ahead of everyone else on that curve and always has been. In the mid-1980s, they had the first 15,000-sheet-per-hour machine running with the first short-inker and the first double-double touchless transfer. That has all been with KBA for 20 years. Again, it is a well-kept secret and a lot of it has to do with how companies market their equipment.
KBA is a family-run company, 6th-generation, and it is a very technically minded company. We are all about engineering. We have gone through the branding phase. We are still new at this, even though our technology is much more advanced certainly than anything else that is available out there.
How does this mindset influence the way that KBA builds presses?
KBA is very unique in how we build printing presses because we custom make every press when one is ordered. We do not inventory presses. It takes us about four months, depending on how busy the factory is. They pick a team of people who are going to assemble that machine. That team assembles the press in factory and print tests it. Every single press is print tested at the factory. Canadian Bank Note ordered a 12-colour machine from us – very specific – and came over to print test it to their standards. Then our guys who built that press went [to Ottawa] to install it.
How does this type of manufacturing slow KBA’s adoption?
It’s a 6-month selling cycle anyway, but it depends. In the commodity market – in Toronto specifically – reality is that there are a lot of trade printers where the lowest price gets the deal. A lot of the printers we deal with do not want to live in that environment because it is not profitable. And there are other press manufacturers out there who cookie-cut six and coaters and they are going to be far less expensive. So if you are in the commodity market and that is really all that you are going to do, well maybe KBA is not the right fit for you.
Do printers question KBA’s service presence in Canada?
It comes up mainly because they are not quite sure who we are and our competitors are going to raise any doubts they can. But the fact is, let’s say, in Eastern Canada we have 25 Rapida machines and we have eight technicians taking care of them. They are all trained on that equipment. So there is one technician for every three machines. If you look at that ratio, we are by far the best in the country. Plus remote service is truly integrated into our press infrastructure.
