But four years down the line, with the next Drupa exhibition fast approaching, did this vision come to pass, and has JDF become the core technology for printers that its backers hoped and claimed it would?

The short and not so simple answer is yes – and indeed no. While the majority of printers are clear about what the letters stand for and understand the benefits offered by integrating JDF into their business, even the most fervent promoters of JDF would admit that there are disappointingly few printers that are currently enjoying optimum benefits.

The transformation was never going to occur overnight – implementing this kind of technology is costly and time consuming – but most of JDF’s more vocal supporters admit they expected adaptation to now be at a more advanced stage. As MIS provider Shuttleworth’s joint managing director Paul Dean concedes: “There was always going to be a time-lag in terms of take-up, and perhaps it has been longer than some people thought.”

The main reason for this lag has not been due to a lack of interest in JDF, but more the lack of JDF-compliant equipment that has entered the factory floor. Most older pieces of equipment cannot be retrofitted to make them JDF compliant (or it would not make good business sense to do so), so the well-documented financial problems the industry has endured in recent times, coupled with the fact that most printing equipment has a fairly lengthy lifespan, has ensured that investment in new JDF-enabled kit has been relatively modest.

“I visited a company recently that had 70 machines, and only one was JDF compatible,” says Chris Leonard, sales support and marketing at MIS supplier Prism Europe. “However, as each new machine is bought, another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.”

Leonard adds that a printer starting from scratch could find an arrangement from pre-press all the way through to finishing that was fully JDF integrated, but such opportunities are rare; it’s more likely printers will invest in new kit as and when their old machines expire. The good news for those taking this approach is that they don’t necessarily have to go the whole way in one fell swoop to enjoy the benefits of JDF – a step-by-step approach can also reap rewards.

Step-by-step approach
“You can still get significant benefits if you do it piecemeal,” confirms Shuttleworth’s Dean. “If you plug in a new pre-press system, you get benefits from that, and then you plug in a new press and you get more. You are building up benefits all the time.”

It’s clear from Dean’s example that the pace of JDF integration will largely be down to the software and hardware providers. Most of the software developers have invested heavily to ensure their products are up to speed, and, to be fair, so have the hardware suppliers.

It’s in the best interests of suppliers of printing kit to make all their new machines JDF compliant. If they don’t, the repercussions could be dire, according to MIS supplier Tharstern’s managing director Keith McMurtrie. “If manufacturers don’t deliver JDF connectivity, they can all forget about it – there’s no point,” says McMurtrie. Dean agrees: “We all have to invest heavily in JDF, and indeed JMF, if we want to be around in five years’ time.”

Fortunately JMF – or job messaging format – has kept pace with JDF developments and will become increasingly important over the next few years as the take-up of JDF, hopefully, increases. JMF is important because while JDF sends out information about the job, JMF sends back information about what’s happening to the job. You can enjoy significant benefits by just implementing JDF (you can’t, alas, just implement JMF) but employing the two technologies is an even more powerful prospect. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” says Dean. “People got into JDF first, but JMF is slowly coming into its own.”

Education about the benefits of JMF and JDF will inevitably play a major part in their future success or failure, and it is clear there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in convincing people of the benefits.

Geoff Stephens, director at digital print software provider TimeHarvest, says none of his customers have asked for JDF capability, so for now, at least, he has no plans to introduce it. “For the mainstream litho market that is going hell for leather for lean and mean production, automating process at every stage is essential. However, the digital market is more diverse, dynamic and service based. It’s massively fiddly, and two jobs are seldom the same so I think that it’s probably the last part of the market that JDF will hit.”

As Stephens points out, JDF is all about efficiencies – saving time and reducing the potential for errors through increased levels of automation – and as times get tough, reducing errors, and, therefore, costs, will become imperative.

“JDF utopia is to automate – to get rid of human hands downstream in production and reduce errors,” explains Tharstern’s McMurtrie. With all of the major suppliers using Drupa 08 to launch upgrades that provide even greater JDF and JMF capabilities, that utopian vision could come a step closer to reality.

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DRUPA 2008
The JDF experience?

If 2004 was the ‘JDF Drupa’ then 2008 should perhaps be labelled the ‘JDF experience’. This is certainly the aim of the International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Pre-press, Press and Post-press (CIP4) and Drupa host Messe Düsseldorf.

With a raft of new JDF-enabled products expected to be unveiled at the show, the two parties have launched the JDF Experience Parc, which will be sited in the Drupa Innovation Parc, occupying most of hall 7. The JDF parc will be dedicated to companies showing JDF systems and software, as well as interoperability with other exhibitors in the parc. There will also be a JDF experience theatre, which will be used to conduct short seminars on JDF-related topics, such as optimising customer communications and automating commercial printing operations. Case studies will also be presented highlighting user experiences of JDF, according to Kodak’s Mark Wilton, who doubles as CIP4’s education and marketing officer.

“Drupa attendees shopping for ways to improve efficiency and throughput will be able to get answers to their questions and get some ideas for how to best put new and old equipment to work,” says Wilton.

For more information, visit www.drupa.de or www.cip4.org