The //wifag customers were especially interested this year since so much had taken place since 2014, the year of the last user meeting in Lucerne. They came to Fribourg from across Europe to share experiences and to network.
It was the first time newly designated Delegate of the Board of Directors and CEO Martin Tschumi was able to welcome the //wifag customers from the newspaper sector. Tschumi provided an overview of the corporate group, noting that besides printing presses/services, it mainly conducted business in packaging. The subsidiaries Polytype and Mall-Herlan produce printing presses for decorating cups and tubes as well as complete production lines for printing metal cans and bottles.
CEO Martin Tschumi emphasized the major significance of //wifag newspaper customers for the overall wifag//polytype Group and the willingness of the corporate management to safeguard maintenance and retrofit services for newspaper rotary printing presses. After //wifag Services Manager Hugo Haymoz had introduced the new structures in his area, several very detailed presentations were given. Head of Automation Thomas Zehnder took on the task of introducing a series of automation possibilities and retrofit products while Sales and Project Manager Martin Santschi gave a summary of recent //wifag projects.
Hugo Haymoz
Even when newspaper printing presses can be assigned to a given series, they are actually always one of a kind. These custom solutions then continue each time a press is reconfigured and retrofitted, thereby reinforcing its uniqueness. That is why the attending experts in newspaper printing were so fascinated to see what had already been reconfigured and further developed in other //wifag machines and what //wifag has to offer beyond that.
Newspaper printing plants have long service lives, sometimes in excess of 20 years. Suppliers constantly discontinue individual parts. It is not always so easy for the //wifag service team to come up with substitute solutions, which if possible, are also expected to improve performance and/or operation. The pace of technical progress is especially fast in the segment of control systems. The user meeting therefore had the task of updating interested users on the latest state of the art.
Pascal Clemençon from the Scandinavian representative office of //wifag provided myriad topics for discussion when he analyzed the changes in service and maintenance philosophy within the printing industry at the end of the presentations. The challenges are growing ever larger for everyone keen about the technical availability of the means of production – be it at newspaper companies, at local service providers or within the Fribourg service team of //wifag. The reason is the diminishing financial leeway in many quarters, which makes the decision of undertaking new investments but also retrofits more difficult and arduous.
Regular inspections and preventive maintenance are steadily more important, as is close collaboration between users and machine manufacturers. Another key objective of the //wifag User Meeting in 2016 was to strengthen the basis of trust for this collaboration even further.
