Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing

Transcription

1 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing A White Paper by Richard Romano, Senior Analyst, WhatTheyThink Sponsored by:

2 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 2 Abstract Automation has become essential to the ability for printing companies to compete effectively in today s challenging print market. While the emphasis has been on automating prepress leading up to and including printing, the bindery has often been overlooked as a candidate for automation. However, new technologies are enabling this last piece of the production puzzle to be included in an overall workflow automation system allowing complete, end-to-end touch-free print production. Introduction Automation has always been met with some degree of resistance. Printing itself is a form of automation that of the reproduction of documents and when Gutenberg s press appeared in the 15th century, one group of people was decidedly against it: monks, whose hand-copying of manuscripts made them the media elite of the Middle Ages. However, the advantages of an automated process for reproducing documents became clear when a German abbot named Johann Trithemius wrote a treatise in the 1490s called In Praise of Scribes, which implored monks not to give up manuscript copying. The problem, though, was that he needed many copies of it in a hurry. So, in perhaps one of the greatest moments of historical irony, he had to have a treatise called In Praise of Scribes printed. While we may think we have legitimate reasons for opposing automation and technological progress, the fact remains that it eventually yields great benefits. The history of prepress and its inexorable march toward complete automation has been an ongoing process of what economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to as creative destruction : a process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. 1 You may remember when color separator was its own business category, and a lucrative one to be in at that. When it peaked in the early 1990s, color separation was (in 2014 dollars) a $12 billion industry. In less than a decade, virtually that entire business was replaced by a single command in Photoshop, a way of automating color separation. While we may lament the loss of the color separation business (or, more accurately, those who were in the color separation business may have lamented the loss of it), the fact remains that the softwareenabled automation of mechanical and photographic tasks opened up entirely new business opportunities for graphic arts professionals. Instead of mucking about with film and darkroom chemicals, they could specialize in high-resolution scanning, color correction, and image retouching and manipulation. And since all this could be done on desktop computers and with less and less expensive scanners, you didn t need the capital expense of, and floor space required by, a darkroom and a large graphic arts camera. As electronic publishing and digital printing evolved over the past several decades, it has always been a case of one part of the prepress process being replaced with an automated tool, and shifting the technical expertise to some other part of the process. Touch and Go The raison d être of automation is to reduce the number of touches that a particular job receives. Ideally, you set up a workflow, and when a file comes in either through a web-to-print portal, , or an online upload site, it is shunted from intake, to prepress, to the right press for the job, and out to postpress. Preflighting, color management, and all other prep work is done automatically, with a human user only 1 Creative destruction, Wikipedia, accessed December 11, 2014,

3 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 3 being involved when problems arise. But even then the workflow can be set up to automatically correct common problems and, in that case, the human user is only required when there is something arcane wrong with a file. Auto Complete The concept of workflow automation is nothing new, and workflow became ripe for automation in the 1990s when jobs became electronic and with the advent of Ultimate TechnoGraphics Impostrip in 1989, which, thanks to its electronic imposition of PostScript pages, took the remaining bit of manual work out of prepress. This not only helped merge prepress shops with printing companies, but also unified prepress and printing processes under a single roof. This just primed the pump for more automation. Even then, though, we were mostly talking about prepress. Finishing was often left out of the automation equation, largely because much of it was offline or nearline rather than inline, but also because it was still a mechanical rather than a digital or electronic process. As finishing equipment became more closely integrated with the rest of the production workflow, suddenly it could be automated. The advent of JDF (Job Description Format) was a major enabler of finishing automation and for a few years around the turn of the millennium computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) (remember that?) was the buzzphrase du jour. JDF and the role of CIP3/CIP4 2 had, and continues to have, a strong impact on the overall effort of the industry to make printing a more automated, predictable manufacturing process. The collaboration among key vendors that are members of CIP4 is instrumental in linking prepress to postpress. Vendors were making the promise of automating many labor-intensive tasks and boosting the overall productivity of the printing industry. Postpress equipment manufacturers were starting to incorporate advanced robotics into their hardware while on the software side, JDF leveraged information technology to link prepress and postpress. Who would have thought that in linking a cutter/slitter, for example to a workflow, JDF would be able to improve job handling, order fulfillment, planning/scheduling, and resource management. JDF makes it all predictable, and therein lies the difference. Like most things, the cost of JDF was also an issue in the earlier days. Like any advancement in science and technology, JDF-enabled equipment debuted with a high cost. But, again like most advancements in science and technology, those high costs came down substantially. Today, you can get a JDF upgrade to bindery equipment for the price of a computer, thus putting JDF within the reach of mid-size printing companies. Add to this relatively simple software that manages the JDF resources from prepress imposition and uses it to automate the bindery department, and you have the possibility of full soup-tonuts automation. JDF imposition is provided by most or all professional imposition systems: Kodak Preps, Heidelberg Prinect Signa Station, Agfa Apogee, Ultimate Impostrip, and so on. Add to these JDF imposition workflow systems software like Ultimate Bindery, and you have the ability exploit new benefits from the bindery department in the prepress stage of production. So this is where we stand today, with finishing being the final frontier of workflow automation. Finishing has come to be seen by many print shop owners and plant managers as the bottleneck in the production workflow. Some of this is a function of the speed of finishing equipment, which often has not kept up with increases in press speeds, especially in the case of production inkjet. A lot of it, too, is the lack of automation. 3 The Need for Speed While most shop owners and plant managers recognize that automation is essential to the front end of the workflow and even that was a conclusion that took some years for everyone to come to questions 2 The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press, and Postpress Organization, or CIP4, is a not-for-profit standards association, whose mission is to foster the adoption of process automation in the printing industry ( 3 It s funny, though: shops that have acquired finishing gear that is equivalent, speedwise, to the press(es) now find that the bottleneck has circled back around to file intake and pre-prepress processing. I suspect that once that is unclogged, the bottleneck will move further downstream to prepress, to printing, and back to finishing. It s always something!

4 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 4 remain as to why the back end of the process needs to be automated at all. After all, as the saying goes, if it ain t broke, don t fix it, right? Well, yes and no, but just because something isn t broken is no reason to not want to improve it. If that had always been the prevailing attitude, there would never have been any technological progress at all! This white paper, then, will answer some common questions that crop up in the context if automation in general, and automating finishing processes in particular. Finishing FAQs Here, then, are 10 frequently asked questions or, perhaps, frequently voiced concerns (FVCs) about automating finishing. Let s start at the very beginning. Why automate finishing? It s tempting to say, because we can, but there is a variety of practical reasons which will be explored in more detail in the rest of these FAQs. The short answer is that automating finishing saves time, saves money, reduces errors, eliminates waste, improve scheduling and resource management, and increases customer satisfaction. Manually setting up a job on the finishing line only takes a few minutes. Will automation really help all that much? A lot of things take only a few minutes, but minutes add up. Assume that setting up the finishing line for a job takes conservatively five minutes. Compared to an automated approach, that s five minutes per job longer than it needs to take. You know how they say, That s an hour-and-a-half of my life I ll never get back? If you re running as few as 20 jobs in the course of a day, that s 100 minutes a day you re losing more than an hour and a half of your production time you ll never get back. How much more capacity could you handle with an extra 100 minutes a day? The reality of the printing business today has made virtually every minute count. Digital printing has opened up whole new opportunities for print service providers, but the very nature of those opportunities short-run, targeted, perhaps customized/personalized jobs has created technological and business challenges, particularly for companies that have transitioned, or are in the process of transitioning, from offset. Specifically, how to aggregate enough short-run, low-margin jobs to make up for what would at one time have been a relatively lucrative 50,000+ offset run? Accumulating enough jobs in the first place is one part of the challenge, but managing capacity once those jobs are obtained is another. And given how many of those jobs are rapid turnaround (sometimes less than 24

5 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 5 hours heck, sometimes less than five hours if it s an important customer), jobs need to get in and out of the entire production workflow as quickly as possible. So if you can free up the finishing line an extra 100 minutes a day or shift, wouldn t it be worth it? It s not uncommon for print managers to say that, when they re running 1,000 to 2,000 short-run jobs a month, even saving one or two minutes per job is significant. My labor costs are fixed and are relatively cheap, so what go I gain by automating? Think about it this way. Employee labor in the context of preparing a job for finishing means manual intervention, or a manual touch. Every manual touch means extra time as well as greater potential for error. This is not to say that your employees are incompetent slackers who do bad work slowly that s not the case at all! Human employees are obviously important, but there are more productive things they could be doing. In fact, it s not uncommon in many shops especially smaller shops for the same operator to be running the press and the finishing equipment, perhaps even other things as well. By automating the finishing, it s one less thing he or she has to multitask. Then there is the problem that different operators can set up a job differently, and inconsistent manual setup can make the end result inconsistent. Think of it like doing math. In the course of a day, everyone likely has to do some math, but depending on what you re doing, using a calculator is faster and more accurate than doing math in your head or by hand. 4 You ve got better things to do with your time than sit and do math calculations longhand. So, too, do your employees have better things to do than set up a job and manually enter specifications for finishing. Manual set up also increases the potential for human error. Sure, we ve all been around computers and machines long enough to know that they are not completely free from error (insert own horror story here), but if an automation system is set up correctly and kept up-to-date, it can run for quite some time virtually error-free. You re more likely to see mechanical failure in production equipment before software failure in the system controlling everything. Humans, being humans, are let s face it prone to make errors. It s human nature, and errors often happen when someone is juggling many different tasks simultaneously. And while human error can be introduced at any step of the production process, finishing is quite possibly the worst place for errors to be made. Once you ve cut, trimmed, slitted, perforated, or even folded several pieces let alone an entire run that s pretty much the ballgame. If the margins or bleed settings or any other specifications were off even a little, you may have no choice but to reprint the job at your own expense. That s a waste of time, money, and materials a wastage trifecta. In an automated finishing system, the specs are entered even before prepress and travel with the job as it moves through the shop, automatically telling the equipment what it is supposed to be doing. As long as things are entered correctly at the start of the job, there is little reason to worry that a spec will be off when it gets to the bindery. I have too many different jobs. How would I even start to automate anything? We all like to think that don t we? Yes, different print jobs can have different specs a different trim size, different bleed settings, different run lengths, different paper types, different combinations of finishing processes, etc. But how different are they really? It s not like one job is ink on paper, another is printed circuitry on a plastic film, and a third is a 3D-printed lacrosse ball. Ninety-nine percent of jobs that come through a traditional print shop have fairly similar job characteristics and only vary in ways that can be accounted for in the software doing the processing. In fact, having too many different jobs may be the perfect reason to automate the workflow. You enter the 4 Sure, there are some savants who can do complex math problems with the speed and accuracy of a calculator, but if you limit your hiring to those types of people, you re going to have a heck of a time finding employees!

6 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 6 salient jobs specifications for each of those seemingly wildly divergent jobs during the file intake process and if the workflow is configured optimally, the system itself will plot the best route for that file through the maze of equipment, from prepress through finishing. It s like GPS for production files. That can actually be more efficient than manually determining the route and prepping each step manually. It also, again, reduces the possibility of human error because a computer can keep track of all the different job specs better than a human can. It s about enhancing efficiency and productivity. I have finishing equipment of all different makes and models. How could I possibly automate it all? Many shops likely have an agglomeration of equipment bought from different manufacturers and at different times. This has, in truth, been one of the long-time stumbling blocks to effectively automating entire workflows, getting all the devices to talk to each other. Traditionally, the pattern of capital investment has been such that finishing equipment was often bought at a later date than other types of equipment, such as a press. As a result, equipment didn t often play nice with each other. That s not to say that there is no way the different parts of the workflow can t communicate with each other kind of like a dysfunctional family s holiday gathering. But workflow automation software can provide device drivers specific to equipment makes and models thus ensuring that all parts of the workflow can communicate with each other. Most equipment today is JDF-enabled, which is what helps standardize communication amongst all the different makes and models. The central brain controlling the whole workflow will have device drivers specific to those makes and models. Sure, not every single piece of equipment will be represented. Some shops may have really really old equipment from a manufacturer that went out of business 20 years ago. But a good automation system will have drivers for makes and models that are common and current out in the wild. My equipment is not JDF-enabled. Does that mean that I can t automate it? Not necessarily. I m sure everyone knows what JDF is by now, but for those not in the know, the vastly oversimplified explanation is it s essentially an electronic job ticket that accompanies a production file through all the stages of production. Just like the old written or printed job tickets we used in the days or yore (or some still use) that have all the job specs written out on them, JDF includes all this information electronically. It can be used to route jobs through the shop and tells each of the pieces of equipment it encounters what the specifications are. JDF has been around for more than a decade and a half and it has waxed and waned over the years; for a while in the early 2000s you could hardly go to a DRUPA or Graph Expo without JDF being everywhere. Despite a great deal of early hype ( It slices! It dices! It s the greatest thing since sliced bread! ), followed by the inevitable backlash ( Is JDF dead yet? ), the fact is that it has quietly permeated throughout the industry and has proven itself to be extremely useful and practical for workflow automation and production efficiency. As a result, most of the equipment sold today by leading vendors is in fact JDF-enabled. But, as I have said, shops do have a lot of legacy equipment which may date from a time before JDF. There are, however, a variety of ways of integrating legacy equipment into a JDF workflow. Bridging software and third-party JDF controllers can be used to allow a piece of equipment to receive JDF/JMF commands. 5 5 JMF stands for Job Messaging Format and refers to the specific language used to communicate information via JDF. Think of it this way: JMF

7 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 7 JDF is too complex, and I don t have programmers. Does that mean automation is not something I can avail myself of? First of all, you really don t need to know any programming to use JDF. For the everyday user, it is not appreciably different than filling out an actual job ticket. And even setting up a JDF workflow doesn t require heavy duty coding skills. It s all pretty plug-and-play these days, in the same way that you don t need to know how to write PostScript code to install or run a RIP. Secondly, more and more of today s software, whether it s production tools like the Adobe Creative Suite or workflow automation systems, are virtually plug-and-play. This is not to say that there s not a learning curve anything has a learning curve if you are not familiar with it but to get the most out of today s systems doesn t require a Ph.D. in computer science or programming. The best workflow automation systems are intuitive to both set up and to use in production, feature an intuitive interface, and are expandable, so as the business changes and grows the automation system can change and grow with it. The printing industry often sells itself short on its ability to master technologies. When you think about the highly technical things that a print shop owner, manager, or operator has to master color theory and color management, operating large unwieldy pieces of equipment, understanding how to create highquality printed products, not to mention the economics underlying it all, learning a few new pieces of software is child s play in comparison. I can store profiles on my finisher and use a barcode to automate the process. Isn t that good enough? That s one solution, and if your needs are modest or you lack JDF-enabled hardware, that might be a good solution. Some finisher can let you program and store 100 profiles that means you can have over 100 different type of jobs. (Ultimate TechnoGraphics offers Ultimate Dynamic Barcodes that will enable you to automate the finishing process.) This solution is limited and somewhat static: you have to rely on preprogramed profiles on the finisher. These profiles are static and will only be suitable for one specific type of job, and you rely on your workflow to put the right barcode for each incoming job. On the plus side, you can automate 100 different types of job which will correspond to 100 different type of workflow queues. But if you wish to make your process fully dynamic relying on software that is capable of generating JDF tickets after reading each job then you will want to opt for a JDF process. Thus, for true end-to-end workflow automation, from prepress to postpress, a more comprehensive solution is required. Can I send information back to my MIS? That s a question for your management information system (MIS), but there is nothing preventing a finishing automation system from integrating with a company s MIS or ordering system. The connectivity using JMF allows reporting results from the bindery equipment back to your MIS if your finishing equipment controller can produce such file. This will allow complete automation from file intake to sending the finished job out the door. Integration with a Web-to-print portal is also possible. My MIS system has some JDF, is this enough to automate my finishing? No. There are other production processes that need to be taken into consideration. In fact, finishing can be automated regardless of how JDF-enabled your MIS is. It s common throughout the industry for MISes to be vastly underutilized, if they re even utilized at all. And full integration with the workflow automation system is a rarity indeed, although many shops are starting to realize the importance of putting all of these pieces together and having all the parts of the enterprise communicate with each other. That s a bit offtopic, and is perhaps a subject for another white paper. Anyway, the point is: regardless of what your MIS is capable of, finishing automation is possible. How? One of the most important processes that affects finishing is imposition. It s analogous to color is to JDF as PostScript is to PDF.

8 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 8 management. The same way you manage your color profiles to print color accurately, you impose files to achieve the correct page position and orientation for precision on binding equipment, whether it s a saddle-stitcher or a perfect binder. If you think about it, imposition could be said to involve, essentially, creating folding and cutting profiles. In that sense, it s about finishing. Most professional imposition software today can output JDF which is why this is the most important part of production that needs to be JDF-compatible, to make the finishing completely automated. OK, I ll bite. How can I automate my bindery department? HP s Direct2Finish and Xerox s IntegratedPLUS Finishing Solution are two printing systems available for automating a workflow from prepress (or earlier) all the way through finishing. What do these systems have in common? Ultimate Bindery from Ultimate TechnoGraphics. It is also possible to link Ultimate Bindery to a simple PDF workflow where other processes are automated for example, with Enfocus Switch. Ultimate Bindery is a standalone solution as well as one that can be integrated into a larger more specific finishing automation system such as those above. Ultimate Bindery enables a webto-finish workflow in which jobs need never be touched by human hands. Once installed, operators can define and manage finishing flows based on the specifications for a given job. At present, Ultimate Bindery supports 17 contemporary JDF-enabled finishing machines, from perfect binders, to saddle-stitchers, to guillotines, to slitters and cutters. It supports jobs with a wide variety of specifications all without requiring manual makeready. Ultimately, it acts as a hub ensuring that the specifications of a job match up with the capabilities of the hardware. And because Ultimate Bindery starts at the prepress stage, it offers the opportunity to preflight jobs based on the capabilities and constraints of the specific finishing devices that will be used. The idea of preflighting for finishing offers a whole new advantage of identifying potential finishing errors before even going to press, which eliminates paper and other waste downstream. So, for example, if the imposition doesn t allow enough bleed for the three-knife cutter, Ultimate Bindery will not send a JDF to the finishing, it will flag it and send an error message to the user, allowing him or her to fix the job before printing. This is a new and valuable benefit of finishing automation. Even if one were to argue that labor isn t particularly expensive, the savings on paper and ink alone is enough justification for finishing automation. Ultimate Bindery also takes advantage of JMF to keep tabs on the status of the various connected devices. It supports both inline and offline equipment, and links with Ultimate s Impostrip to accept imposed JDF files. Ultimate Bindery lets users add new devices, manage the ones they ve got, hold and resubmit jobs, and, most importantly, take advantage of true end-to-end automation. It s easy to install, and features a user interface that is clear and user friendly. The biggest topic in computing today is the cloud and it s a safe bet that the next 12 to 18 months will see more than a little interest in moving more and more software functions into the cloud. The Ultimate Bindery v4 web platform can be integrated into a cloud environment with a workflow, MIS, or ordering system permitting true automation.

9 Look But Don t Touch! Automating the Print Production Workflow from Prepress to Finishing 9 Conclusion To be competitive in today s marketplace, printing companies need to eke out efficiencies wherever they can, and automation at every stage of the production workflow is one way that can be done. And while automating all of the processes leading up to printing has been possible for a long time, it is now possible to automate what happens after printing, as well, which only adds to a company s overall efficiency. This white paper was sponsored by Ultimate TechnoGraphics. For more information about Ultimate s automated workflow solutions, please visit the Ultimate Technographics site at