Gary Peeling, workflow integration pioneer

 

People will still be essential even as end-to-end workflows become more automated as they have the intelligence that machines lack, finds Simon Eccles.

End-to-end networked integration of print production is back in the news again in the run up to drupa. EFI is plugging its Productivity Suite, rumour has it HP will be announcing more automation for its various Smartstream components and Heidelberg, who pioneered this sort of thing in the early 2000s with its Prinect production network, continues to push the concept.

The goal is to link all aspects of running a print business, from admin and finance to sales, order booking, MIS, end-to-end production and finally costing, billing and analysis for forecasting. In principle, eventually a printing works will be able to run ‘lights-out,’ largely without human intervention.

According to suppliers and people who’ve tried it, however much you automate you still need people in the loop, to assign priorities, spot errors and anomalies, and at the hands-on level, to have the intelligence and flexibility that computers and robots lack. Automation though, does the grunt work with accurate repetition and error-free data transfer, without getting bored, distracted or taking tea breaks.

Automation in action 

Precision Printing in Barking and Sunderland is an example of a mixed digital and offset print company that has successfully implemented factory-wide data and workflow integration. Adopting web-to-print wholeheartedly, it now averages well over 11,000 jobs per day. To cope with this it developed its own administrative and production network, OneFlow, and offers this as a cloud-based service to other printers. CEO Gary Peeling says there are about 20 users worldwide today and he expects to have 50 or 60 by the end of this year.

‘Digital printing from its conception has enabled users to produce one copy of something, that was the key step forward,’ says Mr Peeling. ‘What hasn’t kept pace as quickly has been the ability to organise jobs of low value. Our average on-demand print order is £3, which may be a greetings card, a photo book, or perhaps a copy of a report. What’s interesting is that those orders are now our most profitable in terms of gross margin.

‘OneFlow allows us to receive orders electronically by any input system – web-to-print, an online print provider, or via API. It groups similar items together, so we are not dealing with one £3 order, it is a collection of 10 or 30, 300 or 3000. It then prioritises those through pre-press and printing. Using barcode tracking it takes it through the finishing processes, whether guillotining, creasing, folding, right through to shipping. Operators use a work-to list that is updated in real time.’

Although OneFlow will work through JDF networks, it can work with non-integrated kit too, says Mr Peeling. ‘Every piece of equipment can have a barcode reader and a tablet beside it, and this shows the work-to list. It doesn’t matter if the equipment is online or offline. The key thing is to be able to track and trace every single order though the business. As demands change as the orders come in, other jobs will take priority, so in a work-to list for guillotine operators you have red for urgent, amber for less urgent, and green for not urgent. So they work at the optimal level all the way through.

JDF’s partial delivery 

The idea of integrated process automation may be déjà vu, as the drupas of 2000 and 2004 were very much taken up with the promise of linking production with JDF. Although the original goal of ‘plug-and-play’ has receded into the distance, today JDF is the standard for plate making, printing and finishing.

Manufacturers with large enough product ranges have tended to do their own integration, some using JDF/JMF as the internal job data format, but others keeping it as a way to communicate with third party components. For example Horizon, the Japanese finishing manufacturer, has its own pXnet that links all of its current systems that have colour touch-screen controls.

‘pXnet translates JDF language into Horizon’s own protocol to set up an individual machine,’ says Jason Seaber, technical sales director of Horizon’s UK distributor IFS. ‘The operator will still have the control in terms of manually having an overview of the settings. If they agree they press OK ad the machine sets up.’

The controller is the Bindery Control Management System. ‘It can be used for remotely setting up equipment, rather than by the operator standing by a machine entering data,’ says Mr Seaber. ‘A more skilled person in a production office can set up the machine over pXnet.

‘As the machine is running, it is sending JMF live data feedback to pXnet, which is then fed back to an MIS. The MIS knows every second where the job is, how it is progressing, how fast the machine is running, what the estimated time of completion is, so it is a fully looped information system.’

Productivity Suite

EFI ‘s Productivity Suite is its attempt to achieve integration and automation across the whole print process. This is a range of products that it has certified will work together. The company has enough components in its own product range to automate the data flow throughout initial order and pre-press, then printing, as far as finishing.

The company says it wants to reduce ‘touch points’ rather than to get rid of operators completely. ‘Don’t touch what you can automate,’ said CEO Guy Gecht at the Connect event. ‘We humans make mistakes and we cost more and more.’

Productivity Suite’s chart of certified components start with campaign management and cross-media marketing, through web-to-print, costing, estimating, scheduling and all the other MIS functions, then onto its Fiery production servers (plus a few third partner partners’ workflows), with feedback via JDF/JMF and direct machine interfaces, finally leading to warehousing, fulfilment and shipping.

‘What we are looking at is allowing workflows to become somewhat device and output agnostic,’ says Nick Benkovich, EFI’s senior director of portfolio product management. ‘So the choice can be made based on the run length or requirement of the job, but the management of the job is done in exactly the same way. More importantly in some ways, the buyers’ interface to that world is identical. They want one portal, one mechanism to provide a job, to provide the specifications for that job, and to have it produced and delivered.’

The nearest thing to a fully automated workflow from the Productivity Suite is the Quickprint Suite. ‘This is a printshop in a box,’ says Mr Benkovich. ‘It’s an entirely cloud-based solution that’s web-to-print and MIS, all sitting in our cloud. There’s a monthly fee. The only thing local is the Fiery digital print controller. Customers don’t add value and make money by being good at IT. They make it by producing product on time to the quality the customer needs. So the added value is in the expertise of the operators, the linearisation of the press, the quality of the substrate.

Pioneering Prinect 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Heidelberg went on a programme of acquisition that extended its product lines to cover most stages of production. Its Prinect system progressively linked them all up. When JDF became viable this was adopted within Prinect too. Prinect offers a wide scope of integration, more or less off the shelf if you stick to Heidelberg kit, but is able to link directly to some MIS, and via JDF to third party production components.

Chris Matthews, digital equipment business manager for Heidelberg UK, is somewhat sceptical about the prospects for a truly lights-out print factory. ‘I think it’s unlikely. Is it possible? Yes, because we can automate down to the very last thing. But you still need human intervention. You need to prioritise, when there’s a job that has cocked up, you need someone to spot that, and you’ll need people loading and unloading.’

He cites a real customer example of where human nous trumped smart systems. They had a 100-off job with a tricky tint. In theory it was more efficient to run it digitally, but for customer satisfaction and aggro factor, they ran it offset because overall that customer is worth a lot more than that one job.

‘That decision could not be automated,’ argues Mr Matthews. ‘You can let the automation make most decisions, but sometimes there are other factors that influence what you actually do in a given situation. They could let the MIS decide everything, but in practise they don’t.

Tharstern, the UK MIS developer, has done a lot of work in automation too. Managing director Keith McMurtie agrees that you need humans in the loop. ‘Absolutely, you need a gatekeeper,’ he says. ‘Assigning priorities is one thing, but when you’ve got late changes to artwork or you have to switch from one press to another, that’s when you need people in place.’

Mr McMurtrie adds that another decision that needs careful human thought is the one to invest in the automation itself: ‘You don’t just take automation out of a box and plug it in. You have got to do it in baby steps, because you’re not going to go in, sprinkle on some magic fairy dust and have an automated workflow. You’re looking at a 12 to 18 month project.’

In the long term automation can have big benefits and eliminate a lot of work but it can itself be hard work to get set up.