The Engineering of Sheetfed ROI
by Jon Robinson
The steel cookeries of the Ruhr Valley started moving into Eastern Germany about 15 years ago when the Berlin Wall collasped. As the fall of communism spread across Eastern Europe, many of these iron makers originally from Cologne, Dusseldorf and Bockholm continued to move east following cheap labour. As new Silicon Valley orientation of high-tech companies appeared in the Ruhr, establishing the high-precision foundries and manufacturing plants of Rhine Valley, south towards Switzerland, as the new heart of German steel.
"This is more the Swabian belt of German manufacturing, where we say Tüftler to describe technical people who are known for going deeply into things and being inventors," says Dr. Jürgen Rautert, who earned his doctorate in 1990 after studying machine elements and acoustics at the region's Technical University of Darmstadt. "There is a long tradition in mechanical engineering and of inventing things of all kinds – in the automotive industry, but also in heavy machinery."
A job in car manufacturing would have meant relegation into split-task engineering, so instead he concentrated on industrial gearbox factories – "Real machines with big gears, motors and drives was just more appealing to me" – and settled at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. He had no immediate plans to stay with the press maker, as Rautert says, "I was more of an introvert type of engineer, heading for something in the scientific application of mechanical engineering." His skill, however, became obvious and after just nine months, at the age of 32, Rautert was asked to lead Heidelberg's new Speedmaster 52 project.
His task was to solve the streaking problem of the GTO, while at the same time hitting much better solids. He formed a team of engineers from Heidelberg and students from the University of Heidelberg, Germany's oldest institution (established 1386): "We had this unique opportunity to do something on a white sheet of paper from scratch." Using a very large inker for such a small press, Rautert's SM 52 solution debuted in Düsseldorf at drupa 1995. "This was the best gratification for my work that I ever had: being right next to the machine for two weeks and explaining what we had done, seeing the interest in the customers' eyes."
Rautert immediately climbed the corporate ladder, becoming head of development for the entire Speedmaster unit by 1997, then all sheetfed in 2000, of both postpress and production R&D in 2004, until landing his current position as Heidelberg's chief technology officer and member of the management board responsible for engineering, research and manufacturing.
"We made a clear decision on board level to invest higher amounts of money into R&D. We have to cover all segments, including the very-large format," says Rautert. "We have to strengthen our actions to really demonstrate that Heidelberg is an innovation leader in sheetfed offset. Not innovation for the sake of itself, but innovation to really bring down total cost of ownership for customers."
Read the full story exclusively in the October 2007 print edition of PrintAction |
