Job Workflow — Ending the Digital Divide

FROM THE workflow and business standpoints, there’s becoming less of a need to make a distinction between digital and offset printing. New tools are bringing together the formally divided file processing paths, and digital devices are becoming standard equipment for more offset shops. With concerns about quality largely assuaged, it’s all becoming just printing under one service umbrella.

The one exception is variable data printing, which remains somewhat of a special case from a production standpoint due to the processing required to integrate content from databases.

The market that Western Graphics, St. Paul, MN, is targeting with all of its services (digital or offset) is shorter runs of very strategic, on-demand printing, says Neal Johnson, vice president of operations.

“What we’re trying to push is relevant print with a purpose,” he explains. “The client has a reason to print; we print enough for that purpose and that’s it. We don’t print a lot of extra copies to store on a shelf for six or 12 months.”

To compete in that arena, the company has installed two Xerox iGen3 digital color presses, four Xerox DocuTech 6180 monochrome units, two (two- and five-color) 29˝ Heidelberg Speedmaster perfectors and several smaller presses. Western’s operations are housed in one facility that employs about 70 people. It looks to partner with Fortune 1,000 companies and meet their needs for marketing and training materials.

If the printer hasn’t previously produced digital work for a customer, it will ask before printing a new job that way. Once a customer has a trust in its capabilities, the process decision is based on turnaround speed or price, notes the company vice president. “There are some customers who will specify that they don’t want digital printing.”

All jobs first go through Western’s job planning department, which uses crossover charts to determine the most cost-effective way to produce the work. “If it’s close, we’ll do an estimate both ways to see which is cheapest,” Johnson says.

It’s All in the Planning

Once the production method has been determined, the job is planned for that equipment and sent through one common prepress workflow. The shop uses the PDF- and JDF-based Heidelberg Prinect Printready workflow system and MetaDimension RIP. “We end up with an imposed PDF that either goes out to our iGen3s or the platesetter (a Heidelberg Topsetter 74),” he explains.

After jobs are printed, they go back into a common workflow for binding and finishing. The same collators, cutters, folders, etc., are used to process digital and offset pieces.

Western has created profiles for its digital presses to match offset printing when needed and uses color curves to reproduce Pantone colors. Different color settings are used for digital-only work to optimize print quality.

The printer is still growing its variable data business, which currently only accounts for about 15 percent of its digital volume. Those jobs go through the same workflow, but then take a side track for processing in XMPie variable data software.

“Prepress will build the original form in Prinect and then our programmers will build the variable information into it,” reports Johnson. “The prepress operators and programmers sit next to each other.”

Variable data jobs are more likely to come in through the company’s WestNet e-procurement system. It only has about a dozen clients ordering print that way so far.

By comparison, The Bureau of Engraving, a commercial print shop in Minneapolis, has a bit of a split personality. Its digital and offset printing operations are separate divisions with their own P&Ls, but they are located in one (nearly 130,000-square-foot) facility and driven by Kodak’s Unified Workflow solution.

“The divisions have different management teams, but share the same sales force and prepress,” says Patrick Stuart, technology marketing director. “The benefit of having separate P&Ls is being able to analyze what’s working and what isn’t from a business standpoint. There’s a lot of synergy from the production standpoint, and we’ve tried to make our processes as seamless as possible.

“We use Pace Systems’ ePace for estimating and job ticketing, which is flexible enough to be tailored for both environments. Our operators charge their time to a customized digital or offset job ticket, which we distinguish based on job number,” Stuart continues. “Customer service is handled based on the sales rep and is a shared resource. We also have a common bindery department.”

The Bureau of Engraving currently has two Nexpress 2500 digital color presses and three (29˝, 40˝ and 64˝) multicolor sheetfed machines. As a practical matter, digital-offset crossover primarily is just a factor for work that is suited to the 29˝ press because of the format size. That means marketing materials and direct mail pieces, for the most part.

“We are matching color across platforms quite effectively, and have been able to get quality off of the Nexpress that rivals offset,” he adds. “Solid color, flat fills are still a struggle for any digital device.”

“We do a lot of short-run digital work to start up a project and then do reruns of large quantities via offset. We also do a fair amount of offset runs with reprints that go digital.”

Customers have the biggest role in determining if a job is produced via offset or digital,” says the company exec. “Most times it comes down to cost and run length, but sometimes it comes down to turn time.”

Non-variable imaging work goes through the shop’s Kodak Prinergy workflow, with a few special exceptions. One example is as a customer providing a print-ready PDF that can be sent directly to the Nexstation front end that feeds the Nexpress machines.

Imposed PDFs are sent from Prinergy to the shop’s CTP system, but a JDF file is used to drive the digital presses. The workflow system’s horsepower is used to generate PDF files that are optimized for printing on the Nexpress and then kept on the file server.

“We have the Prinergy horsepower processing page -evel data and then we’re sending the JDF data to the Nexpress,” Stuart explains. “We’re able to skip a lot of the processing steps on the Nexstation and control all of the job settings directly out of Prinergy via JDF.”

Initially sending over a small JDF file obviously is a quicker way to get a job into the Nexstation, and pulling over the optimized data at the RIPing stage speeds processing. Prinergy is not directly driving the Nexpress, but it is possible to make the Nexstation operations hands-off, Stuart says.

“We’ve actually put some stops into the workflow because we don’t operate on a first in/first out basis in our digital printing division. We try to bundle like jobs because digital presses excel when you’re able to run the same type of work and don’t have to change settings or do some maintenance to switch over,” he explains.

“Kodak’s spec says a JDF file should delete after print. We keep a copy of the file on our server so the operator doesn’t have to go back into Prinergy to reprint or move jobs between presses.”

The company has adopted a similar production approach for variable data work. Prinergy is used to refine a lot of the resources for these jobs and generate an imposed PDF flat.

“We start our variable data process from there. We use Printable’s FusionPro Desktop application to do pretty much all of our VI (variable information) programming. The end benefit is that this work now RIPs incredibly fast,” Stuart says.

One area where The Bureau hasn’t seen a need to push the technology envelope is Web-to-print.

“We don’t have any customers banging down our door saying they want to do business this way,” notes the company exec. “We don’t want to create a scenario in which we have to force customers into a particular solution we’ve invested in. Most don’t have logic capabilities to determine the best output method (digital versus offset) and price accordingly. Also, our customers want to be able to shop between printers. That said, Web-to-print will be something we do this year.”

Even as its color digital and offset printing workflows are becoming more integrated, Ideal Printers, in Houston, has found it more efficient to keep its digital black-and-white workflow largely separate. The medical industry is a key market for the company, so it produces a lot of forms along with business cards, marketing brochures, postcards and other mailers.

The printer’s equipment lineup includes two HP Indigo press 5000 color machines (replacements for older models), two (2- and 10-color) Heidelberg Speedmaster 102 perfecting presses, several small presses and a mix of Océ VarioPrint (two 5160s and a 2110) and DemandStream (8090) monochrome systems. It operates out of one facility with a staff of about 100 people.

Path of Least Resistance

Ideal has implemented Printable Technologies’ Web-to-print and FusionPro variable data solutions for a portion of its work, but not the majority. “Customers mostly use it (Web-to-print) to order business cards, which usually are produced on our HP Indigos, or envelopes and stationery, which are done offset,” reveals Melissa Willis, production manager.

PDF files that come into the shop from the Printable system and most of its other work is passed to Ideal’s Agfa ApogeeX workflow solution. Simple variable data jobs and black-and-white pieces destined for the Océs follow different processing paths.

Color digital and offset printing jobs are handled by the same estimator, CSRs and prepress department. All work is entered into the printer’s Prism Enterprise MIS, which generates job tickets that are tailored for the requirements of the specified printing process.

Turnaround time and quantity are the primary determining factors for which production method is used, but color gradients and corporate colors can also tip the balance to offset in certain cases, Willis says. Clients are told how a job will be produced, typically at the quote stage.

“We’ll tell them the only way we can get this to you in the amount of time specified is to go digital. Sometimes they accept it, sometimes they don’t,” she reports. In the latter case, suddenly the turn time ends up being not so important any more.

“If it’s a customer we deal with all the time, digital printing is usually not an issue,” Willis continues.

Variable data work goes down one of two paths. Larger projects typically come in via Ideal’s Printable FusionPro implementation, with the resulting PDFs passed to ApogeeX for processing and imposition, then output with the variable data components. Smaller jobs can be done on the desktop, with HP Indigo Yours Truly Designer or QuarkXClusive software, and then sent directly to the HP Indigo Production Flow.

Having imposed, print-ready PDF files makes the larger jobs RIP faster, but the desktop route eliminates the step of generating a PDF, according to Willis.

She estimates that about 30 percent of the shop’s digital color work includes variable data. With the rest, processed PDFs are sent to Production Flow where all the operators have to do is select which of the HP Indigo 5000s they want the job to print on.

Offset jobs are sent to the shop’s Agfa Galileo VS violet platesetter or to one of its two Agfa Accuset 1500 imagers—one outputting polyester plates and the other film for small press jobs.

All of Ideal’s digital press operators came from the offset world, and it has started doing some cross-training of its current offset pressroom staff on the digital machines.

“We just added our second new digital press and we already have it filled up with work,” she says. “The digital end of the business is definitely growing, both static and variable data.”

In the context of integrating workflows, digital printing is usually a reference to toner-based systems (and ink-jet, by extension). There is also a third workflow possibility—digital offset printing.

Carleton Communications, in Mechanicsburg, PA, added a four-color Kodak DirectPress 5334 DI digital imaging press from Presstek in late summer 2006 and followed that up with a Konica Minolta bizhub Pro C6500 digital (toner) color printing system in December. It added the latter unit primarily to get into more sophisticated variable data work, since about 30 percent of the company’s business is direct mail work that previously only used ink-jet addressing.

The shop runs two (a two- and four-color) 29˝ Shinohara traditional offset presses, along with several small-format machines and a Multilith envelope press. Adding the DI presses has enabled it to produce shorter runs thanks to their quick makeready, and print at a higher quality, says Chuck Rothstein, president.

“The time you send a file from prepress until you’re in register and printing is about 15 minutes,” he notes. “And, we can do a 300 line screen on the DI, which is difficult to do on our older presses.”

From One to Many

At the core of Carleton’s workflow is the Screen (USA) Trueflow system, which is a PDF-based solution that can output to basically all of its digital devices, including the DI press and Screen PlateRite 4300 platesetter. That same system even drives an imagesetter the shop uses for government work that still specifies film output.

“About 50 percent of our work is for government clients and the other 50 percent is commercial print. We’ve doubled our commercial customer base in the last six months,” Rothstein says. “Our company targets anywhere from 28,000- to 30,000-piece runs and below. We try to get combination deals where we can do print and mail.”

All jobs are initially processed and preflighted by the shop’s client services department. From there, though, direct mail work is handled by a separate department with its own staff.

Client services is very involved in determining the best way to print a job—DI, offset or bizhub, he points out. “All of our client services people have prepress and design backgrounds. They can communicate with customers as to how a job should flow, depending on the volume and the dollars a client wants to spend.”

Variable data work is handled by the direct mail department because of the database issues and the expertise required on the mailing end, he adds. “We primarily use (Atlas Software’s) PrintShop Mail. We haven’t done a lot of sophisticated projects yet because we’ve only had the bizhub for a couple months. We do expect to keep that (variable data work) in the direct mail department.”

The printer’s bizhub system has ended up straddling both departments—print and mail. It’s also being used to produce short runs of static work, particularly booklets that can be finished using the in-line saddlestitching unit. Jobs slated for that device from the start are sent directly to its EFI Fiery RIP, if the customer provides a usable PDF.

Carleton has worked to synchronize its prepress and proofing for DI and CTP output. Where differences can be seen is in the fine detail of the DI output versus the older presses, Rothstein notes.

“We do sometimes mix the two. For example, we’ll run covers on the DI to get the higher quality and run the bulk of the job on one of the other presses. Primarily we use it (the DI) for shorter run jobs of 10,000 and under.”

Rothstein reveals he spent a good part of a year evaluating all the technology options—DI, toner and ink-jet.

“For our needs, we decided ink-based offset was still the better choice, knowing that we’d need to make a secondary purchase for variable data work. A big advantage of the DI is the consistency and quality.”

Carleton’s Web-to-print capabilities are a “work in progress,” says its president. The printer has been working with a software company to further develop its existing catalog-based print order management system and offers some online proofing capabilities.

It is making connection to clients in another way, though. After acquiring a customer base from another printer in the Valley View, PA, area, the company recently set up a branch office and based a client services/prepress person there to serve local customers. Trueflow enables that operator to be tied into the production server so jobs can be prepared remotely, Rothstein explains. “We’re looking to follow that model in other locations to enable us to expand anywhere while giving clients local service.” PI