The Financial Times is the world’s financial newspaper, available on all continents, which requires effective production management to ensure the paper comes out on time, as global operations director Richard Boulton tells Gareth Ward.

At one time the Financial Times was the local paper for the City of London. Today it has spread its pink tentacles across the world making the FT, as it is known everywhere, a truly global newspaper. Printing on its familiar pink newsprint takes place six days a week at 23 sites around the world, including a Middle East edition that launched in April. More sites are in the pipeline and nothing published today can match its worldwide breadth of penetration while still holding to a local relevance.

The total daily print run worldwide is a fairly modest 500,000 and several print sites have runs of little more than 6,000. Naturally this begs the question – how can such a venture be possible? The answer is that FT Group publishes its newspaper, but does not print it.

The decision to close its printing facility at Bromley by Bow and contract its production print to West Ferry was taken about 15 years ago and FT now no longer owns any printing facilities. This business model has proved very sound; FT has seen year on year growth, with considerable diversification into providing a broad range of business information and multimedia services.

FT may have dispensed with its printing facilities, but that doesn’t mean it has dispensed with a hands-on, day-to-day involvement in the production of each edition. The responsibility to see that the edition, wherever printed, reaches the target audience on the day of its publication falls to Richard Boulton, FT’s Global Operations Director. Hovering in the wings providing additional technical and IT support knowledge is Warren Dupuy.

Boulton is clear about his priorities: “Daily newspapers are more perishable than fresh food.” In other words miss the time slot and that edition is virtually worthless.

He goes on to explain how such a calamity is kept at bay. “All pages for all editions are created here at our offices in Southwark Bridge and converted to single-page PDFs using Eidos, an Italian-developed page make-up system. These are then transmitted to our printing sites around the world according to a schedule, which is drawn up and based on the time the edition goes to press.”

Like all newspaper production schedules there are some pinch points. Putting newspapers to bed on a global scale, as the FT does, suggests there could be a number of them. Boulton says: “It can be pretty stressful between 6 and 9pm, when we haven’t got a complete edition anywhere in the world. However, we do have redundancy and backup services built in.” Boulton makes it sounds simple enough; he is probably being more than a touch modest, as his background is perfect for the job.

In 1979 he was working on remote printing in Frankfurt, FT’s first overseas production site, receiving facsimile pages from a Crosfield Pagefax. At the publisher’s end a scanner would read a plate-ready page, compress it and then send it via satellite. At the production site, the Pagefax writer would decompress the file and a laser would image a new piece of film.

The arrival of a Crosfield Wydnet in 1989 spurred further rapid development introducing a PC-based management of the transmission process. This was still a complex system that required the use of satellites and ground-breaking file compression technology, with many sites needing the FT to install dedicated Pagefax systems.

Developments continued apace with the introduction of IntelliNet, initially a joint venture with HiT (an Italian software developer) and DuPont; and then in 1997 with the replacement of all the proprietary hardware by software that ran on standard PCs and exploited developments in cabled communications.

Around this time, DuPont decided to pull out of mainstream printing and Agfa acquired many of its graphic arts interests. Following the acquisition, Agfa rapidly built on the benefits of IntelliNet. Dupuy remembers developments at the time: “In the latter half of the 1990s, Adobe had developed its Portable Document Format (PDF) and even in those early days it was easy to recognise its potential.” The beauty of PDF wasn’t lost on Agfa, or a number of other newspaper developers. One of these was Autologic, which had developed an extremely sophisticated plate production and management system. Agfa acquired Autologic in 2000 and quickly brought together several other innovations into an applications framework called Arkitex.

Dupuy says: “We decided to go with Arkitex, which was then a well proven product along with a data transmission system that Agfa had under development, called Courier.” Arkitex had a major attraction, as Dupuy observes: “It offered us the opportunity to phase in Adobe’s PDF and, as Courier came on stream, to phase out IntelliNet in a constructive way.”

It should be recognised that these developments had been taking place against the backdrop of the FT’s continuous global expansion. Boulton is rather self-effacing when it comes to talking about the challenges of worldwide print production: “As a newspaper, the FT has a structure we try very hard to retain; generally it is two 16-page sections printed broadsheet collect; but in some regions, such as the Far East, printing collect is largely unknown. There are large variations in what is broadsheet. For example, in some regions the paper is shorter in height but wider. We have to strike a balance that reflects what is achievable in a particular region in which we wish to print.”

The production strategies built up around Agfa’s Arkitex have a rigour about them that leaves very little to chance. For example, the daily flatplans are settled early on and now that four-colour process printing is available at virtually all the sites, Arkitex makes it possible to forward any CYM PDFs as soon as they are available. The text plate can be left virtually until the last moment to be streamed in, so that if there are any changes, only one plate – the black – is affected.

There are many benefits Boulton sees in Agfa’s Arkitex; a major one is that it provides a high degree of standardisation. As a software programme, it can be tasked to manage the requirements of each particular site, taking into account the presses, folders and cut-offs available, and so on; but the really clever bit is the way Agfa has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to produce a standard configuration on which Arkitex runs. HP has brought together a series of process controllers onto a modular stand-alone chassis rack where additional processor boards and storage can be slotted in. All 23 sites around the world have the same rack: the numbers installed at each site may vary depending on the measure of redundancy required, but the only variations are likely to be in the interface with the newspaper’s plate- or filmsetters.

Such an approach delivers a number of benefits; FT can strike a lease agreement for each site, as the cost of setting up and maintaining them is predictable. Local maintenance and support can be put in place as well and the built-in redundancy capacity ensures integrity of service. The introduction of a new printing facility can be carried out without interfering with or disrupting that newspaper production site’s established working regime; and the integration is complete within a predictable time frame, usually about two weeks.

This is an area where Dupuy is very active and he has considerable praise for the contribution Agfa makes: “They handle the preloading and configuration of each Arkitex system and Geert Verecken, Agfa’s systems specialist, is in many ways my right hand man. He oversees all the aspects of getting Arkitex up to speed at the new site and if there are any hardware problems, he sorts it out with Hewlett-Packard.”

Dupuy also explains that Verecken’s team is able to remotely monitor all the Arkitex systems from Belgium. This is a particular plus as it provides the opportunity to call out the local service agents to undertake remedial maintenance or servicing by switching operations to the built-in redundant capacity. A team could be on site before any of the operators are aware of a need for a service call.

The FT takes an active role in making sure the global network runs smoothly. Boulton says: “I handle troubleshooting using a site assessment schedule which includes visiting most sites around the world over a given period. There are issues that I have to deal with from time to time, but I have always been able to do this within a very positive framework. Issues vary and there is no particular pattern. To be honest, the printers we work with are fantastic and the visits are as much about team building and exchanging ideas as rectifying any problems.”

Because Arkitex runs on a common platform there is a considerable cross-fertilisation of ideas and information amongst the newspaper producers. “There is considerable kudos for the printers who produce the FT, mainly by association with our product; but it definitely brings in other business opportunities, both for them and for us,” says Boulton.