Getting on with the job: Print 21 magazine article

Once hailed as the future of production printing, the adoption of JDF-based workflows has stalled in recent years as printers battled with the costs and technicalities involved. But while the initial hoopla has long since died down, JDF has continued to evolve and is now seen as something of a quiet revolution, gradually positioning itself as an essential part of business. Mitchell Jordan investigates just how far we’ve travelled on the road to JDF connectivity since the last PacPrint show.

Napil Abdel has clear memories of last year’s ‘drupa unwrapped’ sessions run by Printing Industries around Australia.

As a speaker at the national presentations, the sales director of Tharstern Australia heard first-hand of the resistance, frustration and overall despondency towards the Job Definition Format (JDF) specification from some of the larger print companies who had come to the conclusion that the technical standard was little more than a thorn in their side, and something that required too much fuss and bother.

One of the annoyed parties was Geon’s general manager of operations, Stuart Shirvington, who was also a speaker at the presentations and still holds strong views.

“There’s a lot of hype about JDF and it’s not living up to its potential,” he says. “From a user’s point of view it can be very frustrating.”

It is a fairly common sentiment, and one easy enough to understand and even sympathise with. In the industry, print businesses of all sizes have long been reluctant to invest in something they have done without for most of their lifetimes. Now, however, Abdel (pictured) believes the tide is turning and that Tharstern is ready to ride the wave.

“It can be a difficult task to convince people of the benefits of JDF and my job has been a little tough during the last few years,” he admits. “But over the last month or two, it has become a lot easier to talk to people.”

Printers are a traditional bunch by nature and change can take time – much longer than a matter of months - but in this case the eerie economic climate has proven to be just the trigger to get them thinking, and most importantly, taking action.

“With the current financial situation out there, some printers are wanting to delve into their own production processes even deeper than before,” Abdel says. “Everyone is trying to reduce their costs and increase profitability, and JDF promises the ability to do just that.”

Having recently completed a JDF installation for a company in Melbourne, and with another set to go live in Sydney during the next three months, Abdel is pleased when the owners tell him that the process has been both successful and satisfying.

“Incorporating JDF into your business is not as difficult as it’s made out to be,” Abdel says, adding that the Melbourne installation took a matter of weeks.
So if it is as easy as he claims, why do so many on the other side of the fence believe otherwise?

“I think that the negativity came about because there were vendors in Australia who were unclear of the requirements of JDF,” he says. “They thought it was a plug-and-play solution which it isn’t, and never has been. Suppliers who told their customers they could just plug it in were wrong and the end-users had some negative reactions to this, which has filtered through into the marketplace.”

Why should I care?
Rohan Holt (pictured) of Lithotechnics, developers of the award-winning Metrix workflow software, holds a far more direct perspective on the matter, stating that: “Your average printer couldn’t give two hoots about JDF, and for good reason.”

Holt, who is just the second Australian to be elected a full member of the CIP4 advisory board (the first being ex-pat, Mark Wilton), holds a very no-nonsense view towards JDF and acknowledges that it does not always sit at the forefront of a printer’s thoughts.

“What a printer is interested in is value for the business,” he says. “The benefits of a specification like JDF are nothing – but the ramifications mean that different systems will work together much more easily.”

Like Abdel, he does hold out hope that JDF will catch on, even if it is as a result of international pressure to conform and follow what our global competitors are doing.

“There are a lot of people operating without it, but it is getting harder and harder to do without – not just in Australia but everywhere,” Holt says.

Abdel’s forecast is that any business operating in the next five to ten years without automated workflow will be really struggling. “They will be competing on an uneven level compared with those who are running it,” he says.

Tharstern currently has 57 live sites running JDF in the United Kingdom. While the company did not have its first fully operational JDF site in Australia until last year, Adbel expects a similar level of interest in the future.

Going gang busters
One of the common criticisms of JDF is that it has not eliminated the need for a physical job bag, prompting many to wonder whether it is worth having in the first place.

In prepress circles, Heidelberg is regarded as a leader in JDF implementation with its Prinect software. However, even Soeren Lange, (pictured) product manager for prepress and Prinect, acknowledges that although there have been significant improvements to JDF over the last few years, it still has certain limitations – especially for gang jobs, packaging and complex finishing applications.

“In theory, using JDF eliminates at least 80 per cent of human interference to a standard job. In reality, it depends on the level of integration,” he says. “Even in most cases, the standard job will still require a physical job bag to at least keep proofs or samples.”

This isn’t always a bad thing, according to Abdel. There are some people, he points out, who enjoy the “touchy-feely” aspect to printing and he predicts that “there is going to be a little bit of an overlap where people wean themselves off the job bag” and move away from the tangible.

Conversely, Lange notes that where job-related data detailing how to produce the job can be stored and tracked digitally, and there is no need to keep a proof, then there is no need for a physical bag. In fact, Lange believes that there are many advantages to avoiding the physical bag altogether.

“An electronic job ticket has the advantage that all job information is available to all users from any location within the network,” he says. “Finding the physical job bag to apply changes may be a challenge, requiring phone calls or actually physically trying to find it somewhere in production.”

Where there is a link between prepress and MIS, prepress and press; prepress and post press as well as feedback from production back to the MIS, then Lange has found that the entire process is much faster and more transparent than with a physical job bag. But in the difficult cases such as gang jobs and packaging, vendors have been forced to find internal ways to get around this. Likewise, there can be problems with creating a practical workflow that combines different types of equipment from different vendors – even when they claim to be all JDF-compatible.

“As soon as you want to combine equipment from different vendors it can become a challenge to realise a working environment,” Lange says. “In cases where this has been achieved, this is normally a unique set-up which cannot be transferred to other environments.”

However, along with Abdel and Holt, Lange is likewise optimistic of JDF’s take-up in the local industry.

“Most printers today have realised the general potential in JDF, which is why, despite the current business climate, there are still many enquiries and projects for integrating workflows with equipment or making better use of available data,” he says.

This all spells good news for this year’s PacPrint show in Melbourne where, just as it was at drupa, JDF will once more be on full display. Heidelberg will again show its entire integrated workflow, Holt’s Metrix software will be a part of the Fujifilm stand and Tharstern has already been approached to be on the stand of two vendors.

“There is no doubt that JDF has come a long way and been forced into the limelight,” Abel says. “It is one of those things you think you don’t actually need until you do need it.”

JDF turns 10
This year it will be 10 years since the likes of Adobe, Agfa, Heidelberg and manroland got together to nut out a common specification that would allow the transfer of information about printing jobs to take place digitally, in effect to create a digital job bag. It was not the first attempt to do so – the CIP3 organisation had already created the Print Production Format (PPF) and Adobe’s Portable Job Ticket Format (PJTF) was another early version – but JDF was envisaged as being a non-proprietary standard that would be open to any number of vendors to implement across their systems and equipment. At drupa in 2000, the JDF project was handed over to the CIP3 organisation which then became the International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress Organisation, or CIP4 for short.

According to CIP4, JDF is “an industry standard designed to simplify information exchange between different applications and systems in and around the graphic arts industry”. The first published version of the specification, called appropriately enough JDF 1.0, appeared in 2001 and this was quickly followed the following year by versions 1.1 and 1.1a. JDF 1.2 appeared in time for drupa in 2004 and it was this version that was adopted by many vendors and led to the proliferation of “JDF compliant” logos and stickers being plastered across all manner of equipment and machines. The current revision of the specification is version 1.4, published in November last year.

Over the past decade, the JDF project has attracted more than its fair share of critics, particularly those who have complained about its overly technical nature and the slow pace of adoption, but through it all the initial impetus for JDF has persisted – the idea that in the 21st century, the printing industry should be able to achieve something as straightforward as transferring information about any particular job automatically from one machine to another, and to do it from beginning to end of the production process. It sounds simple enough but it isn’t, and whether or not JDF ever becomes widely implemented across the industry is open to doubt. CIP4 remains confident, however, and even suggests that the current economic climate may well spark a growing interest in what JDF can offer. In its latest bulletin, it says:
“While investing in a new CTP device, instituting ‘Green’ initiatives or adding new services is likely to be postponed this year, investing in automation where the cost can be amortized over several years, but labor savings recouped in 2009 - just what the doctor ordered.”