Rafael Peñuela Torres, CEO of Manroland Sheetfed, discusses restructuring, the state of the printing market, modern machine manufacturing and the road ahead Keywords: 2008 economic crisis, 2008 financial crisis, automation, book printing, business cards, chief executive officers, commercial printers, commercial printers in China India and Latin America, commercial printers in North America, commercial printers in Western economies, competition from electronic media, corporate culture, cost control, cost per copy, cross training, customer satisfaction, customer service, digital printing, DirectDrive, German companies, German factories, German labour force, German labour laws, increasing automation, in-line foilers, insolvency, Langley Holdings PLC, machine manufacturing, makeready, makeready time, Manroland Sheetfed GmbH, network management systems, niche market, Offenbach, perfector presses, plate changing, press operators, printing business models, printing equipment market, printing plates, press speed, Printnet, quicker response times, Rafael Penuela Torres, reduced workforces, research and development, restructuring, retrofits, senior executives, sheetfed skilled labour shortage, offset presses, Tony Langley, unions, unique value proposition, UV printing, upgrades, Web-to-print

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Canada’s Graphic Communications Magazine
The
New
Press
BuilderManroland Sheetfed CEO
Rafael Peñuela Torres discusses
restructuring, modern
machine manufacturing
and the road ahead
Nick Howard on the
Tiegel’s century-long ride
What to consider when investing in inkjet
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October 2014 • $7.50

2. 12 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2014
I
n late-July, I had the opportunity to interview Rafael
PeñuelaTorres,Chief ExecutiveOfficerof Manroland
Sheetfed GmbH in Offenbach, Germany. A polyglot
born in Spain, educated in Economics in Germany,
and employed in the printing industry since 1992, Peñuela
took charge of Manroland’s Spanish organization in 1999.
By 2003, he was managing the company’s Western Eu-
ropean market and by 2006 Manroland Sheetfed sales
worldwide. Following Manroland Sheetfed’s takeover by
an British industrial conglomerate controlled by Tony
Langley, Peñuela Torres temporarily shared the role
of Managing Director of Service and Sales with a col-
league until 2013, when he became Manroland Sheetfed’s
sole CEO.
In our interview, Peñuela Torres, 54, candidly discusses
Manroland’s change of direction after its 2011 insolvency
and 2012 acquisition by Langley Holdings PLC. He de-
scribes several aspects of the company’s restructuring ef-
forts, working through Germany’s tough labour laws.
Peñuela Torres offers analyses of how dramatically the
offset equipment and printing markets have changed since
being hard hit by the global financial crisis of 2008. He
also divulges how Manroland Sheetfed’s research-and-de-
velopment division is currently adapting its printing
machines to meet a whole new set of customer needs
and expectations.
Victoria Gaitskell: What do you consider to be
the most important sheetfed-offset technology
your company has introduced over the past five
years or so – and why?
PeñuelaTorres:For decades,Manroland has been leading
the development of new technologies for offset printing
– although not all these developments have been commer-
cially successful.For example,in 2000 we launched the DI-
COweb plateless press, enabling a digital changeover from
job to job in less than 10 minutes. It was amazing technol-
ogy for the time, but it was not a commercial success, be-
cause the cost was much too high.
In 2009, we developed the world’s largest perfector, the
Roland 900 XXL, to serve the demand for high-volume
book printing. It allowed offset printers to produce 64 A4
pages in one pass,enabling them to compete with web pro-
cess productivity.
But after commercial and editorial printers took a hit in
the 2008 financial crisis, the demand for this technology
was greatly reduced. Press productivity is only important
if customers have jobs for it. So some of our new devel-
opments did not succeed because of the wrong timing
or costs.
But many others were successful because they were ex-
actly what our customers wanted: In 2003, for example, we
built the Roland 500, the first press to print 18,000 sheets
perhour;andtimehasproventhatthisinnovationinspeed
was the right trend for our market.
We also launched an InlineFoiler that can print cold
foil in one pass on a conventional press. Although at first
it proved popular, it generated complaints that the process
wasted too much very expensive foil; so later we developed
an indexing function to reduce waste in the inline process
by up to 50 percent. This is an example of how we are try-
ing increasingly to generate value for our customers by
our technology.
Our innovations have not only taken the form of heavy
metal, but also the integration of software processes into a
single electronic workflow, as we achieved in our Printnet
network management system.
In 2006, we launched the Roland 700 DirectDrive. The
DirectDrivetechnologyallowedcustomerstochangeplates
simultaneously while the press is washing the cylinders, al-
lowing for zero plate-changing time. Since then many of
our competitors have introduced similar technology, and
so far it forms the biggest step towards a significant reduc-
tion of make-ready time.
Peñuela Torres continues to discuss R&D…
PT: Among these successful technologies, I can’t identify
one single development as the most important; but I can
say that many of our recent developments have focused
on increasing automation and reducing make-ready time,
rather than on increasing press speed.One reason is that in
today’s world we have discovered that speed is not the issue
for our customers.The general trend is that run lengths are
becoming shorter, so increasing press speed does not really
help. A precondition for the improvements we introduce
now is not just that they satisfy our R&D people but that
they satisfy our customers.
Since 2008, it has been increasingly difficult for Man-
roland and our competitors to sell the same amount of
equipment we used to sell. The market has shrunk by 50
percent because print shops are disappearing or merging,
so less demand for machinery exists.
Customers are also running machinery for longer than
planned.Theaverageageof apressnowis13years,and our
customers’ requirements and business models are chang-
ing rapidly; so we are developing new technology like the
InlineFoiler in a way that allows customers to add it on
throughupgradesorretrofitstogetdifferentorbettervalue
out of their existing press.
In addition to shortening make-ready, another of our
R&D goals is to make it easier to handle a press by creat-
ing an easier interface with the user. Our customers are
finding it more and more difficult to obtain highly skilled
operators to run presses, because fewer of these operators
are available; so we are spending a lot of brainpower and
resources to make it easier to operate our technology.Espe-
cially because runs are becoming shorter,automation plays
a tremendous role.
The New Press Builder
by VicToria GaiTskell
Half of Manroland Sheetfed’s 1,800
employees work in the press maker’s
Offenbach plant, while the other half are
spread out across the printing world.
Rafael Peñuela Torres, CEO of Manroland Sheetfed, discusses restructuring, the state
of the printing market, modern machine manufacturing and the road ahead

3. 14 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2014
Since skilled labour is critical to the manufac-
ture of high-performance presses: What was the
size of the labour force in your three manufac-
turing plants before restructuring and what is it
now in your single plant after restructuring?
PT: You are correct – Skilled labour is crucial for press
manufacturers. Manroland decided years ago and con-
firmed under Langley its plan not to do any manufactur-
ing outside of Germany. One reason is that, although we
realize many skilled people work outside of Germany, in
other countries we find it more difficult to find the right
number of them with expertise in all the different disci-
plines we need to build a press.
In the insolvency, we lost 50 percent of our workforce.
Beforehand we had roughly 4,300 employees and we have
1,800 today.Of these,900 work in the German factory and
the other 900 take care of our markets and aftermarket ser-
vices in various parts of the world.
How did you select which workers to keep and
which to downsize?
PT:I don’t know if you are aware of it,but German labour
laws require a company undergoing massive restructuring
to apply for approval on who goes and stays via a so-called
social plan.
The government works with unions to establish criteria
for this process. Workers are assigned points based on fac-
tors like seniority, age and family situation. Adding up the
points results in a pre-selection of employees who have to
leave the company. Because the point system gives prefer-
ence to older workers with seniority and families,normally
you have to ask younger people,sometimes with promising
talent, to leave the company – which happened in our case.
Sometimes, if you have certain workers with critical ex-
pertise,you can offer a successful argument here and there
to avoid the social plan and keep them on board. But we
had only a short time to discuss the plan with the union
and workers council during the last week of insolvency. I
don’t know if the results were right or wrong, but we tried
to do our best.
With a reduced workforce, how are you en-
suring your machinery continues to be of high
quality?
PT: We are still continuing to fine tune our human re-
sources management strategy after restructuring. Langley
was convinced that with our remaining capabilities we are
still able to keep our whole production portfolio. Not one
press was eliminated. This challenge has required us to
cross-train people who were specialists before. For exam-
ple, experts on 700 perfectors have also become qualified
to handle 500 perfectors.
It was quite a challenge, especially for the first six
months of 2012; but now we have a more flexible work-
force of people who can change from one model to anoth-
er on the production line and still maintain high-quality
standards. The employees say they are happy with the new
system,because they have acquired more skills and are do-
ing work that is more challenging and less routine.
In 2012, I was concerned that we would not be able to
manage the whole portfolio with a reduced workforce; but
in fact the presses we ship out today are costing less overall
after delivery. This fact proves that we have been able to
manage with half our original workforce and achieve an
even better result in terms of quality.
With restructuring behind you, what is the big-
gest challenge facing your company today?
PT: After the Langley takeover, our immediate challenge
was to serve customers as well as before,or even better,de-
spite having reduced resources.Even before then,the com-
pany had experienced different phases of restructuring,
but it was only because of the insolvency that we became
aware that our old culture and huge-corporation mental-
ity were responsible for the insolvency itself. We had be-
come too heavy, too bureaucratic, too self-confident that
we couldn’t fail, and too slow in managing, reacting to the
market, and responding to our customers.
Our new shareholder Tony Langley knew we needed
to change our attitude first. During the first year, he spent
three days a week helping to transform us into a mittel-
stand [German for middle-sized] company with a hands-
on attitude and quicker response times.
Now the biggest challenge is to keep this new culture as
part of our daily business and avoid falling back into the
old ways.Especially in the last two years,when profits have
been better than expected, it creates the expectation of go-
ing back to the good old days when salaries were higher
and expenses less controlled. It’s an issue I need to keep
an eye on.
Why should new sheetfed-offset presses con-
tinue to interest commercial printers in North
America, one of the world’s most mature print-
ing markets?
PT: Commercial printers in industrialized Western coun-
tries are in a different position than commercial printers
in China,India,and Latin America,where other electronic
media are still less widespread and print is still the main
transmitter of commercial messages. In North America
and other Western economies, the commercial sheet-
fed-offset print segment has suffered more since the 2008
financial crisis because it must defend its position against
electronic media and digital print.
But after 20 years, digital printing is still far from dom-
inating the market. It still represents one single digit of to-
tal printed volume, although the marketing noise is very
loud and gives the impression that digital is dominating.
In reality it will take years for digital to achieve a bigger
percentage than what they have today,because the cost per
copy is high for digital and many enhancements, such as
UV and foil coating, are not available in digital. I think for
many,many years sheetfed offset will remain the dominat-
ing technology. It may be less loud and less sexy, but for
sure it is the best way to print massive volumes of sheets
of cardboard or paper for packaging or commercial print.
When it comes to cost-per-copy for industrial volumes,
no method is cheaper. Today, we see Western commercial
printers finding new business models to stay in the mar-
ket or even grow by adding value to commercial print and
escape from the commodity print market. We see more
and more commercial sheetfed-offset printers who have
managed to find their own niche by focusing on a specif-
ic application, or way of adding value, or way of servicing
customers.
For example, sheetfed offset is still the most used meth-
od to print business cards, and it also lets printers develop
workflows to produce simple products for customers on
24-hours’ demand. So today’s successful business models
include Web-to-print production of business cards and
other simple products, printed with the highest efficiency
at an unbeatable price.
What is the best advice you can share with the
many small- to mid-sized commercial printers in
Canada who continue to rely on sheetfed offset
as their primary production process?
PT:I’mnottheguytogiveadvicetoprinters.Theyarepro-
fessionals who know best what they have to do.
But one thing I know from observation is that it is cru-
cial for printers to identify and follow the right model for
their business. They need know what they can do better
than others.
Basically they have a choice between two ways of mov-
ing forward: One is to find a way to be different from
their competitors with a different product or a different
approach to customers through their services, response
time, flexibility of workflow, or other factors. The second
way is to achieve excellence by increasing productivity and
reducing the cost per copy; for example, by using a large
commercial press to produce large volumes with good or
good-enough quality. The right business model can be
either mass productivity or differentiation.
Rafael PeñuelaTorres, Chief Executive Officer, Manroland
Sheetfed GmbH.
Manroland R&D focuses on make-ready rather than press
speed.
One of Manroland’s skilled German workers prepares a
900 press unit.