Solution Profile: Louisville, KY Newspaper 135,000 square feet Capable of sorting 132 newspaper bundles per minute Provider: FKI Logistex

In late 2001, The Courier-Journal, based in Louisville, Kentucky, announced plans to build an $85 million, 135,000-square-foot plant expansion. The facility, to be built next to the existing plant, would house three new state-of-the-art Colora® double-wide offset newspaper presses from Koenig & Bauer AG.

Installing the new presses would add a material handling challenge to the project. The paper would have to revamp the plant’s newspaper handling system to ensure the investment in the presses was worthwhile. After initially talking to a variety of newspaper industry equipment companies, The Courier-Journal project team chose FKI Logistex® (www.fkilogistex.com) to design, build and integrate a custom material handling solution.

The Material Handling Decision
At the heart of the FKI Logistex material handling solution is the company’s leading-edge UniSort® XV sliding shoe sorter. The FKI Logistex UniSort XV gives The Courier-Journal a zero-impact, high-speed, single-unit sortation system that accurately and quickly routes newspaper bundles to their shipping destinations. This alternative piqued the interest of the project team, as competitive solutions from traditional newspaper industry companies offered dual pushers for sortation. Pushers use air power to “push” a steel plate against the bundles to direct their flow, a heavy-impact system that damages the bundles in transit.

Another unique feature of the FKI Logistex system involved tracking of the bundles. Unlike typical sortation systems that sort based on a bar code or RFID tag on each item, the FKI Logistex UniSort sorts the newspaper bundles to their dock destinations without any external identification on the bundles. Instead, the FKI Logistex custom-programmed controls system is managed by The Courier-Journal staff, who input each print run’s information. As the bundles wind their way through the conveyor system into the sorter, the controls system maintains a detailed counting and tracking of the bundle slugs.

With a maximum sortation capacity of 132 bundles per minute, the UniSort can sort bundles from any tie line to any destination with no restrictions on rate or destination. Competitive solutions that offered pushers would run at maximum speeds of 60 bundles per minute, requiring two sorting lines to come close to the speed of one UniSort. The Courier-Journal’s old handling system sent papers only to specific destinations, making the ability of the FKI Logistex UniSort system to route from any input line to any output line another important decision-making factor for The Courier-Journal. This gave its mailroom the capacity to more effectively and flexibly direct bundle flow.

FKI Logistex delivered a sophisticated and innovative conveying, sortation and controls system that would accurately, quickly and efficiently direct the paper’s bundle flow — all within the very tight space constraints of the new facility. With the new presses and newspaper handling system in place, the paper has now doubled the speed of its print runs. This has allowed the editorial department to extend its news deadline and also enabled the transportation department to better meet its delivery schedules.

is a Proud Member of the CSS & AS/RS Product Sections of
Material Handling Industry of America

FKI Logistex
9301 Olive Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63132-3299
Tel: 1-877-935-4564
manufacturing@fkilogistex.com
www.fkilogistex.com