Effects of newspaper structure on productivity

Sammanfattning: There has been a radical change in the newspaper productionprocess in the last 20 years when the computers became a commontool. Printing presses also print more colours and pages at ahigher speed. The mailroom process is becoming more automatedand the production speed increases.Not only technical changes have taken place. Thecircumstances for the graphic arts business have also changed.Today newspapers face competition from other media such as freesheets, The world wide web etc. both as news deliverers and asadvertising channels.On one hand the newspapers need to keep up the competitionand the increased use of advertising inserts in newspapers is aresult of this. On the other hand the increases use of insertscomplicates the product and thereby the production process.Earlier studies have shown that the structure of thenewspaper has an impact on the productivity in the productionprocess. Both the average net production speed and the averagecruising speed decreases with the number of pages in the mainproduct and the number of inserts.The aim of this thesis is to:    Identify the main reasons for unplanned stops and theoccurrence of such stops in pressroom and mailroom.    Analyse how different page counts in combination with thenumber of inserts in the newspapers produced influenceproductions speed, the occurrence of disturbances, and downtime in both pressroom and mailroom.    Discuss how different types of inserts affect productionin the mailroom.    Discuss how the disturbances and stops in the mailroomaffect the mailroom personnel.More knowledge of the influence the newspaper product has onthe productivity can help to increase understand the processand manage and plan for the variations.