The New Print Production Mantra: Unified Offset/Digital Workflow

With digital printing in its various forms having been in the marketplace for more than 15 years, most industry pundits agree it has reached a level of maturity. Buyers of printed product, who once may have had objections to the quality or price of digital printing—or both—now no longer voice those objections for most projects. And as they have come to understand the advantages of digital printing— the ability to economically produce high quality short runs of full color materials on demand and its unique capability to deliver one-to-one communications—the face of printing has changed forever. No one is suggesting that offset printing is going away; far from it.

But there is no question that as buyers have become more educated about their options, and enamored with their ability to produce shorter runs of more targeted materials, even offset run lengths and turnaround time expectations have taken a sharp downward turn. Some 80 percent of all print runs today are in quantities of less than 5,000. And the luxury of quoting weeks to produce a printed project has long gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Meanwhile, manufacturers of offset presses have not stood still. Today’s presses are more efficient than ever before, with significant automation built in that drives makeready times and waste down. And direct imaging (DI) offset presses, where plates are imaged on the press rather than in a separate platemaking process, are gaining popularity as well because of the accelerated production times and reduced makeready they enable.

To meet this range of customer demands, many printers have both offset and digital production operations. Until fairly recently, these operations were considered as separate businesses, often even located in different buildings with different business names. Jobs were prepared either for offset or digital based on conditions at the time the job was received or scheduled, and if for some reason, a job needed to be moved from digital to offset or vice versa, it often had to be prepared all over again, to meet a different set of equipment specifications and requirements. While buyers were enjoying the benefits of a blended offset/digital setting, printers were facing ever increasing challenges presented by the confluence of shorter runs, faster turn times, and disparate, parallel workflows, making it difficult to gain optimum benefit from their offset and digital investments.

Ray Cassino, Director, Prepress Product Management for Heidelberg, puts it this way: “Because digital presses were so different from offset, and because of the lack of sophisticated workflow systems for these devices when they first hit the market, we had a dual evolution. Traditional prepress products were driving filmsetters or CTP based on one architecture from an established set of vendors, and different players were bringing digital presses to market with their own workflow systems based on their applications needs five to six years ago and earlier. Now that digital presses have gotten faster and deliver better quality, it makes no sense to have two parallel workflows that will never intersect.”

Deborah Cantabene, Vice President of Workflow Marketing at Xerox, echoes these sentiments. “Printers should be able to bring jobs into the offset print manage-ment system and manage them through without different prepress processes and different databases for different output devices.”

Enter JDF
Addressing this production dichotomy was one of the promises of CIP4 JDF, an initiative in 2001 that many NPES members are familiar with, as the Association played an active role in helping it get launched. Now, five years later, JDF-enabled products are making their way into the marketplace in growing num-bers and much work has been done within the vendor community to ensure that products can work together effectively to deliver more automation and more efficient workflows. An outgrowth of this is the ability to unify once-parallel offset and digital workflows.

Unified Workflow: Tangible Benefits
At a time when print as a communications medium is facing stiff competition from alternative media, the industry can ill-afford the inefficiencies inherent in disparate offset/digital workflows. And not only from a production perspective— with ever-shrinking margins, printers also want and need a unified view of their entire business operation, whether offset, digital or a blend of both. They need to eliminate the Tower of Babel created by different vendors speaking different languages, and the discrete production silos that have difficulty communicating with each other, let alone the business systems that are critical to profitability in today’s fast-paced world.

Luckily, because of increased adoption of JDF and other industry standards, combined with increasing collaboration among suppliers to the industry, not only are offset and digital workflows becoming more efficient as they proceed along their parallel paths, but those parallel paths are now beginning to converge.

Kodak’s Director of Product Development Jon Bracken says, “JDF is not a panacea, not an end in itself. Rather, it is a useful tool to address a business need. There has been a lot of hype, but now the hype is over and we are getting tangible benefits.”

One printer who is profiting from these tangible benefits is Kwik Kopy Printing, a six-person shop located in Scottsdale, Arizona. Purchased by Tony and Ruby Cordova five years ago, the company had a blend of offset and digital print-ing capabilities. On the digital side of the business, Kwik Kopy is an all-EFI workflow shop according to Tony Cordova. On the offset side, the shop had three different analog platemaking systems. Cordova says, “Our team is exceptionally skilled in utilizing EFI’s Command Work-station for job preparation, and we were interested in learning whether we could leverage the existing Command Workstation workflow to streamline plate-making, as well as better integrate the offset side of our business with our EFI Print-Smith print MIS solution.”

And integrate he did. Cordova acquired a Presstek Vector TX52 platemaker to replace his previous three platemaking systems and front-ended it with a Presstek Facet RIP, co-developed by EFI and Presstek and based on an EFI Fiery workflow. Now Cordova manages his entire shop—offset and digital—from one interface. From the time the job comes in the door through customer pay-ment, the team at Kwik Kopy has complete transparency across its multivendor installation of offset, digital, finishing and business systems. Not only does this allow him to better manage the flow of work through his shop, it has enabled him to, in effect, eliminate an entire headcount. What’s more, he says, “We had an employee voluntarily leave, and now we have the luxury of either not replacing him, or replacing that headcount with a different position that will benefit the organization in new and different ways as we continue to grow the business.”

Andy Schaer, Senior Director of Corporate Communications at EFI adds, “Our vision has always been to provide a completely integrated workflow regardless of the out-put device to provide printers with visibility into the entire business rather than to treat each type of output as a discrete business. JDF is at the center of our integration plans, and we will be continually expanding the numbers of components of the workflow as well as the robustness of those connections, with more data flowing among more components. With this type of infrastructure, printers can make better decisions and increase their profitability.”

In another example of vendor collaboration, Heidelberg is actively working with several of the digital print engine manufacturers, including Xerox, to allow offset printers to leverage their mature offset workflows all the way up to the point of print. “Now, as the print shop owner or the CFO or production manager, you will be able to see shop status from a single inter-face,” says Schaer. You can tell what your finishing, conventional printing and CTP devices are doing, what’s going on in preflighting, and the status of your digital printing devices at the same time. And you get the same robust level of data about the digital press as you get from your offset press, as well as a seamless flow of data to and from your print MIS for both your offset and digital production operations. This is the advantage that JDF brings.”

Key Elements
Kodak’s Bracken points out that there are four areas that must be addressed in an effective unified offset/digital work-flow: production, data, business and color. He adds, “Color matching between offset and digital is a huge challenge. Increasingly, printed products are a blend of offset and digital in one deliverable, and the customer expectations for color matching are high. With respect to data, customers are telling us that as they move into digital printing, they want to utilize that unified workflow interface for data cleansing, data mining, and ensuring that the information used to generate variable data printing is correct.”

Xerox’s Larry Zusman, Worldwide Manager of Work-flow Marketing Solutions and Services adds, “As we move forward, the alignment between digital and offset capabilities will be even greater in the offset workflow. People are already looking at how to set up variable data from within the offset workflow, and that is the next horizon. We are working hard with our offset partners throughout the world to integrate better and make this a reality.”

Unified Workflows: Still Not Perfect
Zusman offers a caution, though, saying, “There is a perception in the marketplace that this is a plug-and-play environment—that with JDF, A plugs environment to a digital press, all you get is the basic functionality of that press; you can’t access all of the special features.” That, he points out, is why close collaboration between offset and digital manufacturers is important to deliver finely tuned solutions, based on JDF but which also extend the integration to take full advantage of both environments.—NPES