By: E&P Staff The New York Times has finished installing Agfa's Arkitex Courier and Arkitex Director solutions, which it will use to manage remote printing of the newspaper at 22 print sites around the country.
The Times will use Courier to send pages electronically to the remote sites, while Director will be used at those sites to manage workflow, production and tracking of the paper. Tracking information will be sent back to the paper's New York headquarters via Courier. The system includes a full disaster-recovery system, located at The Boston Globe.
The installation is part of a five-year alliance crafted between the Times and Agfa Graphics, making the Belgium-headquartered vendor the Times' "preferred supplier" of workflow software and violet computer-to-plate products.
Under the same agreement, Agfa supplies the Times with six violet CTP systems (four Polaris XTVs and two Polaris XCVs) for its College Point printing plant in New York City. At other sites, the New York Times Co. also already has 17 Agfa Advantage violet-laser platesetters.
The Polaris XTV and XCV can image as many as 200 plates per hour. The XTV (trolley version) holds 1,000 single or 500 double plates, while the XCV (cassette version) has fully-automated plate-size switching within a single production run.
The College Point plant also uses Agfa's Arkitex AutoPlan to set up editions, page counts, colors and plate position, and Arkitex Afirma process-control software to monitor production within the CTP system, processor and punch bender, and should enable the Times to move to a "lights-out" operation, according to Agfa.
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