Strong Q&P team turns out for drupa 2004

Six members of the Quote & Print organization made the long haul to Düsseldorf to survey the state of JDF and CIP4 in the printing industry. They found the Australian developed product was up there with the best of the MIS products in the world.


Hailed as the ‘JDF drupa’ this year’s trade show had a dedicated CIP4 park where vendors from around the world were able to present the latest advances in process communication. It proved to be the ideal venue for the Q&P people to get a complete overview of the latest developments.

The team of six were Terry and Jenny Gallagher, Chris Clear and Ron Pelley from Beaut Solutions, the NSW distributor, and David (pictured at the entrance to the messe) and Judy Bell from Beloran, the developers of Quote and Print.

According to Judy Bell, of prime interest on the development side was to see the level of JDF integration. “It was very useful to see just how far vendors from management information systems (MIS), had progressed with being able to transfer information between prepress, production planning, scheduling, press and finishing by JDF. The return of information concerning job status and actual production times to the MIS via JMF was displayed on a number stands,” she said.

While the integrated networks between vendors at drupa were using pre set data, they were creating jobs and transferring JDF files for a full range of production processes from different equipment suppliers. According to David Bell, the system appeared to work well in this environment. “At this stage there is not a lot of use made of the JMF data and there remains many practical issues to be resolved. However JDF as an open system can certainly speed up workflow in the prepress and planning area by eliminating rekeying of data thereby minimising errors and reducing costs,” he said.

It is expected that Q&P will commence site testing JDF/JMF in Q&P sites with JDF enabled equipment in September.

“We were able to review most of the more than 20 vendors of MIS at drupa and were pleased to see that the features and functionality of Q&P are in line with, or in advance of, the leading European and UK systems,” said Judy.