ABB introduces Version 6 of its MPS Production press management system

ABB introduces Version 6 of its
MPS Production press management system
Found first taker in Norway’s widely read newspaper Bergens Tidende

Leading Swiss automation supplier ABB has released the Version 6 of its popular MPS Production press management system.

The latest version of the system sees the transfer of the entire system to the PostgreSQL Database. This provides an ideal basis for the virtualisation of the system while retaining all the functionality and advantages of the MPS Production 5.

Virtualisation of ABB’s previous version MPS Production 5 was made prohibitively expensive by the Oracle license model. This motivated the development team of ABB to look for a new solution, so that their customers could benefit from the advantages of virtualisation without large expense. The solution was found in the PostgreSQL Database, which provides all the functionality required by MPS Production without the punitive license costs. The entire system has been converted to run with PostgreSQL and released as MPS Production 6.

Added advantages

New advantages in the newly launched MPS Production 6 is that the system can use the virtual environment chosen by the customer, in which the customer provides both the environment and the virtualised systems, or ABB provides these using the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation solution. Here, virtualisation means that the application can be moved to a new platform very simply, thereby freeing users from the challenges imposed by the hardware and operating system life cycles.

Moreover, virtualisation allows an additional copy of the application to be deployed in parallel with the original version. As a result the new application can be tested thoroughly on the target hardware and, when the tests have been completed successfully, a simple switch between the two versions is made. Virtualisation ensures that the data can be stored redundantly, thereby providing a hot-backup solution that is even more robust than a conventional cluster solution.

User functionality

MPS Production 6 retains all the user functionality of its predecessor MPS Production 5. The newly released system also sees an architectural simplification as no MPS Production 3 application is required any more in the background. New customers and those upgrading from older versions of MPS Production will enjoy a wide range of functional extensions that have been added to the system in the course of its many release versions.

When it comes to functional extensions, customers migrating from the old MPS Production 3 system will experience these additional benefits cited as following:

Intuitive, graphical user interface providing an enormous improvement of usability and functionality.
Reduction of operator work through use of templates and default values.
Automated inker curves.
Comprehensive imposition generator and editor.
Full support for all aspects of variable product formats (including reel size, plate size, etc).
Sophisticated version handling of print products and page contents.
Support of multiple RIP definitions.
Full support of multisite installations.
Forecast information in scheduler.
Print form composite thumbnails in product planner.
Grouping of paper types into classes for automated inker curves, ink density regulation profiles soft-proof ICC profiles.
Online Production Viewer.

Bergens Tidende as first adopter

Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidendem, published by Schibsted Media Group in Bergen, is the first adopter of MPS Production 6. Bergens Tidendem is Norway’s largest-circulated newspaper outside Oslo. Around 30 percent the newspaper group is owned by a host of English and American investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Being rated as one of the oldest newspapers in Norway, inception of Bergens Tidendem is dated back to 1868, and it has won the European Newspaper of the Year award in the regional newspaper category by the European Newspapers Congress in 2011.

ABB delivers solutions that provide unique and totally integrated end-to-end control, protect existing investments and provide management information essential to improving profitability in the newspaper industry all over the world. The company is writing the future of industrial digitalisation and driving the energy and fourth industrial revolutions by switching to introduction of latest technological innovations, such as MPS Production 6. ABB operates in more than 100 countries.