Bringing JDF to the Bindery

JDF is many things, including ambitious. It tries to describe, in a computer language, virtually all processes involved in printing. Essentially, it's attempting to encapsulate hundreds of years of printing. And it's succeeding.

At the same time, however, JDF is a work in progress. At this writing, it accounts for more than 1,500 pages of specifications, and still not all printing processes are described. JDF will constantly change, as needed capabilities, new equipment and new printing processes move forward. The underlying structure is there to support those inevitable changes. The ultimate purpose is to allow equipment to be flexibly configured to programmatically handle any type of job, and to allow software to collect and process data coming back from those processes.

If you only have simple processes working on the same type of job every time you run a press, so that the bindery is always set up and waiting for the next similar job, then you don't need JDF.

For example, there's a printing company that only uses seven different layouts on its plates, ever—one for each of seven different products coming off the press. So for cutting, they only need to program cutters for the seven different products. They don't need JDF at all. They simply switch back and forth between the seven plate programs on the press and the seven cutting programs on the cutters—no folding or stitching, no palletizing, no collating; nothing but print and cut.

To set JDF aside for a moment, there is considerable automation going on in the bindery today. Servo motors and computer systems clearly revolutionized a lot of manufacturing operations. Automated, wrench-less setup is something the leading manufacturers have been delivering for some time now. But these are islands of automation, not an end-to-end solution. You still have to address each machine individually, setting it up using its own little computer system.

Furthermore, JDF's predecessor, PPF (Print Production Format)—another de-facto industry standard administered by the CIP4 organization (www.cip4.org)—has itself delivered great benefits in the areas of cutting, folding and stitching set-up operations. (It is most well known for setting ink-key presets on presses from prepress data.) But PPF is not actively being developed anymore, with manufacturer focus now on JDF.

One of the reasons is that PPF is a proprietary format, and JDF is based on an industry standard XML (eXtensible Markup Language). More to the point, PPF is unidirectional and single-dimensional. It provides some of the set-up information but is missing a lot of metadata that must be determined and entered manually, making the job more labor-intensive and error-prone.

In terms of the state of JDF today, much work being done is focused on Interoperability Conformance Specifications (ICS), which define how two devices or a software package and a device will inter-operate with one another. There is a Bindery ICS, but it is based on a limited idea of another machine (a JDF Controller) communicating to a bindery device.

For example, prepress or upstream (or “outboard” solutions) have never, to date, encompassed the details necessary to program finishing equipment. They usually don't even have a database.

The more promising work in progress is that of an “MIS to Finishing” ICS: work that needs to be completed. This involves the Print MIS systems encompassing the additional information in their database architectures that is required to have the MIS fully understand and communicate all job details to the bindery equipment, coordinating bindery activities globally and collecting status information from that equipment. Print MIS systems will eventually supplant all other “outboard” job planning and imposition tools to bring increasingly “touchless” automation.

JDF will become truly valuable when the MIS is able to understand more about how the job is to be produced, rather than how much it's going to cost and how long it is going to take. Machine limitations can then be offset by implementing end-to-end workflow. MIS vendors are working aggressively on this now.

Another missing factor right now is the employee (i.e., data collection). JDF today can model machine processes very well; it is job oriented. It doesn't look at the makeready vs. run waste, nor the maintenance performed by employees. But even if JDF were to incorporate such data in the specification, this approach would still require bindery equipment manufacturers to recognize that information outside the devices themselves needs to be tracked.

Some forward-looking manufacturers see this as a goal, but their employee tracking currently doesn't deal with things that are non-job related (like cleaning up around the machine). To capture this data today requires a data-collection station located near the device to capture the additional items, again resulting in additional “touches” that should be eliminated.

Even when the inter-device certifications and ICS are well in hand, there will still be information that individual devices don't care about or can't act upon in an intelligent way. Print MIS again will be extremely important here—understanding the big picture from end-to-end, acting as a data aggregation point and supervising scheduling and processes.

Nevertheless, new automated bindery equipment can be a good investment. If you buy equipment with JDF functionality built-in today, along with a guarantee from the vendor of future compatibility, you can get a return on investment now and even more benefits later when the ICS specs are complete and Print MIS vendors deliver software that automates the end-to-end processes.