“Everyone in our company now sings from the same hymn sheet.” That was the claim made by Nick Lee, managing director of Southampton-based B2 printer LPC Printing upon installation of Heidelberg’s Prinect Integration System last year.
Prinect is a central JDF controller that manages all the production functions in a workflow, linking it to the MIS at the front-end. According to Lee, having real-time, transparent information allows him to analyse the work and identify which jobs make a profit, and which do not.
“The immediate benefits are about saving time and better accuracy because the information only has to be entered once into the system,” says Lee. “Long-term benefits include job information that can be used for analysis, as well as during the production cycle.”
Any printer worth their salt is looking for ways to increase the efficiency of their company’s workflow, and JDF integration can reduce manual intervention, increase job throughput, and bring benefits to the whole production cycle. However, having a streamlined, automated business requires a level of investment that needs to be justified. Fortunately, the investment can often justify itself.
Connecting production and administration
A JDF controller enables an MIS to link with any stage of the workflow where JDF-enabled equipment exists. The type of information submitted can vary depending on what part of the workflow it is entered in, but it is typically job data such as client name, job description, quantities, schedules and imposition information.
When an estimate becomes an order, the information held within the estimate can be made available within the JDF environment to set the parameters on the equipment. Job data is used to populate the MIS, giving the estimator a repository of defined workflows for specific products, and which can be used for future jobs.
Once a job is underway, the remote data-collection points on the shop-floor can be used to provide up-to-the-minute production data on the job’s status. “This enables production and scheduling software within the MIS to plan and monitor the flow of work through the factory,” explains Nigel Tyler, research and development director for MIS provider Optimus.
Information is passed between production scheduling and all the devices concerned, by JMF (job messaging format). JMF can also be used to send data to cost accounting modules, reporting and statistics, and when production is complete, a file containing all that data can be sent back to the MIS.
Tharstern’s sales and marketing co-ordinator Ross Edwards says the real-time feedback of a job makes its progress more visible. “From a customer service perspective, they can help to keep a job moving along by chasing up approvals and keeping the customer informed of progress,” he says.
Tharstern has purposely included JDF connectivity software as a standard feature in its MIS, “to make a JDF workflow more affordable and achievable for printers,” adds Edwards.
Extended functionality
With some MISs, JDF interfaces are standard, while others include it as an upgrade. Christian Gugler, product manager for MAN Roland’s Printnet production management system, says the kind of investment required to integrate the administration and operational sides of a workflow depends on the type and generation of products the client already has.
“Old hardware especially will need to be updated – that is often the case in post-press where only the newest machines can be integrated with JDF,” says Gugler. “But age isn’t everything – MAN Roland presses are designed for networking, so even a 10-year-old 700 can be integrated with a software update.”
Heidelberg UK Prinect and CTP marketing manager Lance O’Connell says that in isolation, basic software components are very reasonably priced, but this is not the end of the investment: “most MISs are modular so that their functionality can be extended,” he says. “Customers should always look to stage an investment with their own growth.”
One such modular low-level investment product, dubbed ‘JDF for the little guy’ when it was introduced, is Objective Advantage’s Symbio. According to chief executive Gareth O’Brien, Symbio is an automation tool designed to remove man-hours from each job at several points: “In a nutshell it focuses on taking a job from the point the customer places the order, automating the pre-planned tasks of layout creation and driving that into the pre-press, while at the same time developing the post-press instruction.”
According to O’Brien, having a comprehensive MIS without JDF connectivity will still result in a highly manual workflow: “When a job gets to a digital press in PDF form on a file server, say, the press operator will still have to check the details and work out how many sheets they are supposed to run.”
O’Brien says Symbio can establish the parameters of a job ahead of time: “A job can come off a web-to-print system straight into Symbio, which can then tell the MIS that it’s there and instruct its future path.”
Embracing automation
Symbio is focused on two types of print operation – commodity players who fulfil a specific, set number of jobs, and digital printers with a high level of value-added services, such as web-to-print, personalised URLs and one-to-one marketing. “Our product tends not to be suitable for printers who are all things to all men – the common strategy of printers who can’t turn down a job,” O’Brien says.
O’Brien claims that in the US, where he is based, the top 25% of printers generate 96% of the total profit of the industry. “One of the key differentiators is that these firms embrace automation. They see it as a capital investment rather than an expense,” he adds.
However, that doesn’t mean companies with low levels of automation can’t boost their profitability with integrated systems. One such example is Newcastle-based digital printer Pre-Press Digital (PPD) – a firm with a rapidly growing turnover despite not having a computerised MIS at all. PPD turns quotes around quickly using a highly regimented ‘t-card’ board that details what job needs to be completed, and when.
And of course there are other types of MIS that are not JDF-enabled. JobControl from TimeHarvest offers a simple way of receiving quote data or generating a new job from scratch. It then produces all the necessary job documentation from job ticket to invoice, and can route closed jobs to external accounts systems. TimeHarvest’s complementary DigiQuote is a costing program for users of most types of digital and conventional small-format sheetfed presses.
“The whole idea of DigiQuote is to take a basic brief from the client and get it done effectively as possible,” explains TimeHarvest managing director Geoff Stephens. “It’s often not the cheapest quote that wins, nor is it the quote from the favourite supplier. In fact it’s often just the quote that gets there first.”
In regard to JDF, Stephens admits that anything which makes the printing process slicker and enables a better level of service is a good thing, but he queries why JDF take-up has been so slow. “I think what’s holding it back is that it’s hard to formulate a cost justification to the printer. They can see the benefits, they can see where the efficiencies are in the process, but there’s an investment to be made, even if it’s only linking together machines which are JDF-compliant.”
While it hasn’t been fully embraced by printers yet, most MIS providers fully recognise that JDF has a major part to play in times to come. “For sometime now we‘ve ensured that our software supports the requirements of JDF,” says Imprint managing director Nick Bourne. “The penetration of JDF is moving forward. Much of the equipment in use pre-dates JDF, but this will change as JDF evolves and our clients update their plant and systems with JDF-compliant models.”
Gareth O’Brien feels that installing an MIS and having JDF-enabled equipment is not the end of the story – sometimes, extra integration works is needed, whether in terms of tweaking the MIS or the machine interface to pass data smoothly, or adding extra modules to an MIS to fully enable the integrated production model. “Just because they are both JDF-enabled, it doesn’t mean that an MIS and a digital press will be able to talk to each other. I feel there’s always going to be some degree of integration required to link everything together.
CASE STUDY: TWENTYONE COLOUR
Following the purchase of two MAN Roland 500 presses in 2004, digital and litho specialist TwentyOne Colour installed a Tharstern MIS last year. With the additional help of MAN Roland’s Printnet production management system, this enabled the Glasgow-based firm to have full JDF connectivity.
“The integration of JDF really does live up to the promise that was first demonstrated to me at Drupa 2004,” says TwentyOne Colour director Trevor Price. “We have accelerated job creation times and are able to move job-specific details straight into the presses via JDF and Printnet.”
According to Price, this means that the paper path and inking information is automatically loaded into the press, further speeding up makeready. “We are now able to move from one job to the next in just seven minutes on a five-colour B2 press.”
TwentyOne plans to put JDF into to its finishing department as its next stage of investment.
