Digital Workflows Get Dyanmic

Could 2004 be the year of digital workflows? That certainly seems to be the perspective of vendors, many of whom are gearing up to showcase their workflow innovations at Drupa, the international show taking place in Germany in May.

"A lot of people have started to say that this is a revolutionary workflow year," says Chuck Gehman, director of product marketing for EFI Production Workflow Solutions. "They realize that workflow is a crucial activity that's still labor-intensive and complicated, perhaps overly complicated. In a business where efficiency is essential, getting jobs from customers to print production is still too difficult."

The term itself, experts acknowledge, means different things to different vendors, and the definition seems to get wider every day.

"Workflow traditionally was a term utilized in prepress, which is why most systems advertised are prepress-oriented," explains Dennis Ryan, Prinect product manager for Heidelberg USA. "To us, workflow is characterized by our Prinect system, which encompasses an end-to-end process in the broader sense, everything from prepress, to press, to postpress."

Mike Harvey, vice president of workflow marketing for Xerox Production Systems Group, says his company takes a similar approach.

Harvey says, "We think of workflow in a customer context: the entire end-to-end process from how a job or document is created right through to the print provider completing it, shipping it, and generating an invoice. We believe that all of the systems and processes need to be integrated in a digital environment, to manage short runs and to leverage new capabilities like variable-data printing."

With more vendors adopting an "open standards" approach, where systems from different manufacturers can be easily integrated with one another using technology like JDF, workflows are becoming increasingly seamless.

Says Bruce Otte, worldwide solutions offering manager for IBM's Printing Systems Division, "Customers are demanding some level of open standards architecture today. In a few years, they'll assume that your products comply with an open standard; those that don't put the vendor at a distinct disadvantage."

Visitors to Drupa in Düsseldorf will see this principle in action, as vendors team up to illustrate how the Job Definition Format can be used to create a seamless workflow.

EFI, for instance, will show Press Connector, from the former Printcafe, with Heidelberg, Komori, and MAN Roland presses using JDF connectivity. Prepress Connector, covering the front end of the workflow, will link EFI's MIS tools with Screen's TrueFlow solution, also using JDF connectivity.

Creo is taking big strides in the area of workflows, introducing many new solutions in February and March. Synapse Director provides production management and connectivity between the new Brisque version 5.0 workflow solution and Networked Graphic Production (NGP) systems, allowing users to manage and track the production process across multiple Brisques.

The new Prinergy Evo system, the latest evolution in the popular PDF-based workflow solution, features Creo's color management, trapping, and screening technologies, and is designed for simple, automated operation from the desktop.

For Creo, Xerox, and others, creating workflows that can optimize both digital and offset presses simultaneously is an important goal. "A lot of printers' customers are asking for work to go in both directions," explains Chris O'Connor, Creo's director of business development and alliances. "Getting the first thousand pieces of a run out to a customer to support a quick mailing might be done digitally, then the remainder printed conventionally."

Without integration of these two workflows, O'Connor notes, operators on both sides of the operation end up repeating the same prepress steps.

A partnership between Creo and Xerox, to be demonstrated at Drupa, aims to achieve this goal. Print Manager, part of Xerox's FreeFlow workflow solution, will be integrated into Creo's Prinergy software, allowing Prinergy users to integrate their workflows into Xerox DocuColor presses. Xerox FreeFlow Print Manager can now be launched directly from Prinergy, while offset jobs for digital printing can be sent to the Creo Spire color servers driving the Xerox digital presses.

"Historically, Prinergy was designed for offset jobs," explains Mike Harvey of Xerox. With the new initiative, he says, Prinergy "still will have the capacity to manage PDF-based workflows for offset jobs, but also can use that very same workflow to make the call late in the cycle to send the job to offset or digital."

Users can create job tickets from within Prinergy based on where they are sending jobs, he adds, allowing for "the same type of job ticketing, but for all digital devices too, whether they're color or monochrome."

Creo's O'Connor calls the partnership "our first step toward the integration of offset and digital workflows." He adds, "As we go forward, we plan to work with all of the NGP partners to make sure that their systems become more relevant for digital workflows as well."

From Xerox's perspective, offering a solution amenable to offset printing works to the company's advantage, Harvey says. "Some Xerox customers are 100% digital, but a lot more have a mix."

He continues, "Companies like ours frequently focus too much on products we have, but forget that what we have has to integrate into the customer's environment. This integration is the focus of Xerox's FreeFlow workflow solution."

Xerox, he explains, recognizes that many customers have an existing workflow but want to take their businesses in a different direction, which means changes are afoot, specifically, for example, in the handling of short runs or long runs.

FreeFlow, introduced at the On Demand Show in 2003, builds upon Xerox's well-established integrated workflow components, including DocuSP, a production print controller; DigiPath Production Software, for scan and makeready, archiving, and Web submission; VIPP, for variable-data applications; and EOMS, for management of on-demand and transactional printing. More than 40,000 installations of these products exist today, Harvey reports.

The FreeFlow suite also encompasses a range of services offered by Xerox, such as workflow assessment and marketing tools to help printers that are adopting new capabilities like variable-data printing.

EFI is pulling together the resources of its recent acquisitions of Printcafe and T/R Systems to offer customers versatile workflow solutions. "The big thing about our focus is workflow convergence, that is, workflow for offset and digital coming together," says Chuck Gehman. Commercial printers that are adopting digital printing and smaller shops looking for comprehensive workflow solutions both can benefit from this convergence, he contends.

A highlight of EFI's numerous workflow-related offerings is Velocity OneFlow, a PDF-based prepress workflow that can easily be integrated into any computer-to-plate, computer-to-film, direct imaging, or digital printing environment. Another, EFI's Balance workflow software, a job and device management solution, allows digital printers to optimize applications such as variable-data printing, Gehman explains.

EFI also is rebranding T/R Systems' Digital StoreFront product, an Internet job submission application that can be integrated into the EFI workflow, as well as T/R Systems' MicroPress system. Finally, EFI is integrating Printcafe's commercial print management systems, Hagen, PSI, and Logic, into multiple workflow solutions, Gehman says.

"There is offset workflow that has evolved over the years, and then digital workflows, which are vendor specific," says Gehman. "We want to create a solution that works with all of the output devices available, plus connects to other vendors' workflow systems, through JDF."

Heidelberg is entering the workflow convergence game in a big way. With Version 2.0 of its Prinect Printready solution, to be launched at Drupa, Printready will be available as a common front-end workflow that can be used to support both offset and the Digimaster and NexPress digital presses, according to Dennis Ryan.

The Prinect workflow solution records and optimizes every step in the printing process, from prepress through production to finishing. Prinect Printready, the prepress portion, uses JDF as an internal production mechanism.

"The benefit of our experience using JDF," says Ryan, "will allow us in the future to build an entire Prinect workflow that is end-to-end in a much broader sense, in JDF. We'll thus be better able to deploy JDF throughout the entire Prinect spectrum, efficiently and effectively."

Other features in Printready Version 2.0 include numerous performance and system enhancements, as well as optional extensions to the system to allow for remote soft proofing, remote job submission, and content management, Ryan relates.

Hewlett-Packard is another manufacturer incorporating the "open standards" approach into its workflow solutions. HP's Production Flow, a scalable RIP solution, is based on standardized systems, JDF, PDF, and PPML variable-content streams.

Designed for sites operating single and multiple digital presses, Production Flow is primarily used by medium- to large-size commercial printing plants working with multiple data streams, according to Mike Mello, North American category manager/HP Indigo Digital Presses.

"HP's goal," says Mello, "is to make digital printing not only on-demand, but also to automate the front end so it's touchless, essentially driving toward reducing any sort of manpower or cost in the prepress area."

Additionally, Production Flow offers Internet-friendly capabilities that allow users to integrate the system with other vendors' on-line fulfillment tools. The system connects job tickets in Production Flow directly to Internet software vendors (Printable is one example).

With the JDF workflow and open standards architecture, Mello explains, users eventually will enjoy the integration of everything from job estimation to finishing. "We look to be fully involved with this. Some products coming out soon will eventually be able to take full advantage of CIP4 standards and JDF workflow to provide full production integration on a press floor," he concludes.

IBM, which has adopted "On Demand" as a central marketing theme, views workflow as the key to efficiency in any printing environment; moreover, explains Bruce Otte, "A key pillar of on demand is that the workflow must be based on open standards." IBM's job tickets, he notes, are based on JDF standards, allowing them to be scalable and flexible.

IBM's Infoprint Workflow is designed to easily integrate with IBM Infoprint Manager to provide a single print management interface. Infoprint Workflow provides a single point of control for the entire production process, from data creation and print-job acquisition through mailing. It also easily interfaces with other systems, such as Creo's Prism system for page impositioning.

"We want to help our customers create a manufacturing environment out of their operations," states Bert Prospero, a principal in IBM's personal and printing group. "Too much paper is still being used to manage the process, and a lot of information still resides mostly in operators' heads. Very little automation and lots of error-prone processes remain."

Infoprint Workflow, which Prospero describes as a "highly configurable, generic workflow engine," is customizable based on clients' needs. Initially, the solution was used more by printers dealing with the transactions market; now, Prospero reports, more print-on-demand users are adopting Infoprint Workflow.