Fujifilm said these integrations enable printers to benefit from advanced automated production direct from the MIS system into the XMF workflow, offering a more streamlined print production process, enhanced productivity and lower costs.

A key benefit of the integration is the ability to deliver additional PDF content attached to an MIS job, the manufacturer said, with the help of automatic page assignment for future reference purposes.

This allows printers to streamline the delivery of artwork throughout their business and enables old jobs to be visible after they have been archived and deleted from within XMF.

Print jobs can also be created automatically. Jobs created in the user’s MIS are pushed directly into XMF, including the full job description, customer details, product details and imposition requirements.

The integration also enables users to select XMF job templates based on existing templates, which are picked automatically using criteria within the MIS.

Fujifilm Graphic Systems Europe workflow product group manager John Davies said: “MIS connectivity in general has been in this product since the beginning and has matured over time. We’ve now taken these integrations to a higher level than we have in the past.

“That’s partly because sometimes customers start on an MIS project integration and then realise that from the MIS side these projects become quite expensive, and as such they don’t take them as far as they had originally wanted to.”

The integration with EFI Pace, which Fujifilm received certification for just over a month ago, enables users to benefit from complete two-way end-to-end workflow integration.

XMF’s messaging to EFI Pace automatically completes all pre-press job plan activities in EFI Pace Scheduling, reducing the time and touches for pre-press data collection.

A job can be submitted to XMF directly by EFI, with the jobs then automatically processed in XMF. Once done, XMF sends information about the production timings and the number of plates used back to the MIS and the data is stored. This enables the EFI Pace MIS to automatically manage both the cost of the job as well as plate utilisation.

“Certification is an endorsement from the vendor, in this case EFI, that they see that we have actually implemented this how they would like it to be implemented, which means that when there are future updates of that MIS, we’re pretty much guaranteed that that’s going to carry on working,” said Davies.