Heidelberg

AT&T's decision to hire John R. Walter away from R.R. Donnelley & Sons left Wall Street analysts puzzled. Walter seasoned himself in the commercial printing industry, they noted, not the field of telecommunications. For that reason, the experts deemed AT&T's president unqualified. William L. Davis, Walter's successor at R.R. Donnelley, has faced similar scrutiny. When R.R. Donnelley appointed Davis chairman and CEO, industry insiders scratched their heads. Davis had no prior experience in the graphic arts. What could Emerson Electric's former senior executive vice president possibly do for North America's largest printer? The same thing he has done for other companies: pinpoint untapped potential

Whether the issue is tracking the status of 4,000 color images for a massive catalog or managing a vault of more than 100,000 images, text and fonts for a sophisticated prepress operation, the secret to success is securing an ingenious workflow. If one word could describe the prepress fervor of 1997—the motivating factor in the development of sophisticated software tools for expediting everything from imposition to job ticketing—that word would be workflow. Workflow, workflow, workflow—that was the single most effective, overused and yet understated buzz- word for 1997. Large commercial printers were implementing extensive technological investments to enhance prepress to postpress workflow, midsize commercial