Workflow Integration:Going with the Flow

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W O R K F L O W

Many years ago, at the startof the “digital revolution”in print production, tech-nology was king. It was

always new and different, and the intro-duction and application of technologyachievements were often and justifiablycelebrated as industry milestones.

Witness the excitement over Post-Script and desktop publishing in themid 1980s; the emergence of laserfilm imagesetting and desktop scan-ners around 1990; CTP and PDF inthe early 1990s; and the efficienciescreated by page layout tools Page-Maker and QuarkXPress and, later,InDesign. And, of course, the adventof the user-friendly Internet browserin 1995.

In the early years of the digital rev-olution, individual technologies—from color profiles to FTP—producedquantum leaps in efficiency and pro-ductivity. Each advance was like BuzzAldrin’s historic moonwalk—smallindividual steps that collectively repre-sented giant leaps for an industry that,just 30 years ago, was rooted more inthe 19th century than the 20th—morein art than science.

It used to be that companies coulddabble with digital workflows as theywished, picking and choosing tech-nology components and assemblingthem like a hybrid “component” stereosystem. Back then, production entre-preneurs and “visionaries” could startwherever they wanted and connect the“islands of automation” as theyadapted digital technology to analogprocesses. Apply a little color manage-ment here, courier a Cromalin to theclient over there, ship the native file tothe printer or publisher with the con-tract hardcopy proof, and hope theyhad the same software versions andcolor technology to properly open,prep and print it. Then “sit on press”for a couple of days—at a print shopclose by if you were smart—to makesure what was printed was what theclient wanted.

The piecemeal approach to work-flow in the “good old days” workedbecause when technology was king,most links in the chain of turning doc-uments into digits were modular,allowing companies to add new tech-nologies to their workflow as theygained knowledge and experience.

The quiet revolution in productionmanagement is raising profits anddelivering new business opportunities.

BY JAMES CARPENTER

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Although the staged implementation of modularworkflow technologies still can provide efficiencies,the age of isolated, individual technology develop-ments is over. The bar has been raised considerablyover the years by technological maturity and userfamiliarity. If you employ a collection of isolated tech-nologies that are not integrated within your own shopor with your clients’ processes, it’s safe to say you’renot taking advantage of common digital efficiencies.

For nearly a decade “workflow” has been the mantraof print production, and with good reason. Workflowdescribes the sum total of the production process, fromstart to finish, rather than the workings—or the indi-vidual technologies—of the component parts, nomatter how sophisticated and “gee whiz” they may be.

Applying digital technology to workflow improves

accuracy and efficiency by reducing productionerrors, time, and costs. Or, at least that’s what it’ssupposed to do.

For much of the past decade, technology solutionproviders and production professionals alike havebeen trying to “close the loop” on production—andmake it predictable, efficient and productive—withvarying degrees of success. Closing the productionloop is difficult precisely because workflow is aloop—it is a continuum where the starting pointmust reflect the finished product.

In the expanded view of workflow continuum thatis emerging, “the loop” the print publishing industryneeds to close extends beyond the walls of print pro-duction. The workflow loop can and often doesextend geographically, organizationally and func-

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tionally—from content creators guided by creativeideas channeled through specifications provided byprint providers who may be located at the far cor-ners of the earth, and through billing, workflow guid-ance and tracking systems in between.

Trying to produce jobs with an unintegrated work-flow is like driving a Ferrari at breakneck speed ontoa country lane. At best, a non-integrated workflowcan slow lightning fast digital production to a crawl.At worst, it can put some serious dents in your profitmargins and your ability to compete.

However even today, graphic arts production con-sists of islands of automation. As a case in point,page layout tools speed the file creation process, butspecifications of the target publications or printprocesses are often still loaded into the layout pro-grams manually. Sophisticated color managementthrough ICC profiling, device calibration and closed-loop verification systems virtually guarantees thatfiles can be printed as planned, but digital proofingsystems are only now being integrated into the cre-ative and production process. And, once the file isapproved and ready to be produced, content creatorsand service providers alike deliver them in a varietyof ways—from couriers to email attachments andFTP uploads, and in formats from native applicationsto every type of PDF imaginable.

The Case for Integrated WorkflowsExercising such freedoms provides flexibility, but atunnecessarily high cost. The multiplicity of deliverymethods and file formats requires labor-intensivemanual set-up, checking and verification to ensure that

a plethora of possible errors don’t spoil the printedresults. And even with today’s sophisticated preflightingtechnology, problem files can and do get through.

In its 2006 Production Trends survey of Canadianmagazine publishers published in January, Mastheadmagazine pointed out that the survey’s 67 respon-dents representing 171 magazines provided 726makegoods in the preceding 12 months. Althoughthe $1 million-plus (Canadian) value of those make-goods may not seem very alarming, the number ofmakegoods tracked in the 2005 survey had tripledfrom the previous survey conducted in 2003. Andwhen extrapolated across Canada’s 2,383 magazines,the actual cost amounts to nearly $15 million—a cost“about equal to the revenues of a mid-size publishingcompany,” according to the authors.

If the Canadian survey figures are generally repre-sentative of the magazine industry, the annual cost ofmakegoods could easily exceed $60 million (U.S.)among U.S. publishers, and $100 million (U.S.) bypublishers of the more than 18,000 titles worldwide.Throw in the cost of advertising makegoods in news-papers and commercial printing re-dos, and it’s clearsome serious money is being wasted.

Even more startling is the notion that serviceproviders—despite the current level of digital tech-nology applied from job creation to printed results—are incurring some of that cost unnecessarily.

How can this be? With all the technology that’sapplied throughout the digital supply chain, why doproduction problems still exist?

The answer is, because even though most workflowstoday are “all digital,” many are not well integrated.

The integration of digital technology is like thedevelopment of a crystal, where each new crystalforms a link with other crystals until the entire struc-ture becomes a tightly knit network with multipleredundant paths contributing to its overall strength.

Workflows of the future can and will become inte-grated, interconnected, closed-loop speedways. Andalthough this crystallization eventually will happenon its own (just wait for winter to arrive), serviceproviders can induce workflow crystallization artifi-cially through better process management andthrough the use of software management tools devel-oped to handle such tasks.

In this view, an application file that has not beencolor managed is not as good as one incorporatingan ICC color profile that can match proofs onscreen and paper to printed results. A run-of-the-

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W O R K F L O W

Closing the production loop for an integrated workflow requirescreative projects be guided by specifications from publishers or printproviders who may be located at the far corners of the earth, andby data from billing, workflow guidance and tracking systems.

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mill PDF file is not as good as a PDF/X-1a file suitedto print production. And receiving a PDF/X-1a fileby email does not afford the same possibilities forquality control as receiving the same file through amanaged workflow delivery system enabling work-flow efficiencies from pre-delivery file validation toemail notification and booking system tie-ins.

Some of the information and technologies thatcan be integrated to tie isolated print workflowprocesses together include ICC color managementprofiles, digital asset management (DAM) software,billing management software, mailing list data-bases, PDF/X standards, JDF metadata tags and jobmessaging format.

Each of these technologies and standards has itsplace in the digital supply chain. For example,PDF/X is a key component of efficient print work-flows, while Digital Asset Management (DAM) willbecome increasingly important as workflowsbecome more automated.

Job Definition Format (JDF), in theory, drives tothe heart of the matter. This universal electronicjob ticket specification released in April 2001 by theCIP4 organization is designed to simplify the jobspecification process, ensure cross-vendor systemcommunication, and automate many of today'smanual production processes. In other words, thegoal of JDF is to integrate workflow, serving as thelinkage that holds the various workflow sub-processes together and as a sophisticated elec-tronic switching system to manage all theprocesses as a coherent whole to produce a pre-dictable end product.

But in practice none of these technologies—evenJDF—produces integrated workflow of and by itself.They can’t close the loop without somebody or some-thing else doing at least some of the integration, byproviding critical ingredients like target media specifi-cations or job metadata. Similarly, none of these tech-nologies alone is useful if the process of which they arepart is not guided by customer requirements and spec-ifications of the destination media.

Production success isn’t being decided any longerby how much technology is being applied. Rather, itis being determined by how well your technologysystems are integrated and managed as a functioningwhole to achieve a pre-determined goal.

Workflow Convergence: The Next WaveThe printing industry needs to get all technologies

heading in one direction to fill in the remaining gapsin conventional print workflows and to prepare forthe next wave—the convergence of workflow, man-agement and distribution that’s required increasinglyon a global scale.

Just as ice crystals begin to form when water reachesthe freezing point and accelerate rapidly as the tem-perature drops, we believe the integration of the var-ious technologies will reach a tipping point—a pointat which technology adoption accelerates, and theentire workflow becomes an enabling phenomenon.

When this integration happens, it will spawnother workflow technologies that enable the pur-suit of new opportunities for graphic communica-tions professionals.

In fact, we believe that this tipping point hasalready arrived.

Recently, there has been a “quiet revolution”taking place, with some agencies, clients and ser-vice providers exploiting the power of workflowmanagement technology to work more closely andstreamline the production, management and dis-tribution of campaign materials to destinationsaround the world.

And if that weren’t enough, the application of thisworkflow management technology does not apply justto print, but ultimately across all forms of media—print, broadcast, cable and streaming.

This convergence of digital workflow production,management and distribution into a seamless media

Creative

Page LayoutPDF/XDatabase ManagementDigital PhotographyVariable DataWorkflow AutomationStandardsColor ManagementProofingPreflighting

Premedia

Asset ManagementColor ManagementCTPDatabase ManagementDigital ProofingJDFMonitor ProofingNetworks and ServersPDFPreflightingStandardsVariable DataWorkflow Automation

Delivery

Digital & Traditional PrintingElectronic DeliveryWorkflow AutomationStandardsColor ManagementGeneral TechnologyWeb ToolsLarge FormatJDF

Workflow Resources

Workflow resources today describe a multitude of technologies thatoften are applied individually rather than in an integrated fashion.

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landscape—what we call Global Media Exchange orGME—is intimately tied to the efficiency and pro-ductivity that corporate brand managers, publishers,creatives and graphic services providers all need toachieve, and increasingly on a global stage.

In its simplest form, GME gives organizations theability to manage their creative assets in any formatacross any geography from any office workstation.

GME enables clients, agencies and productioncompanies to collaborate in real time to create dig-ital assets and to share the efficiencies that this col-laboration enables. One beneficial effect of thisconvergence is to enable local organizations to actglobally, while allowing global organizations tooperate locally—and all to operate more efficientlythan ever before.

It is important here to point out that we are notmerely talking about using the Internet for filetransmission or mere “delivery.” Rather, GME usesthe Internet as an enabler to apply many othertechnologies in a highly efficient manner andaccomplish a complex and changing set of work-flow tasks.

The key to GME lies in the term “exchange.” Whereworkflow even today typically describes a unidirec-tional stream, GME describes workflow as a bi-direc-tional or even multi-directional continuum. Thismulti-directional flow is far more complex, tappinginto a wide variety of technologies to enable muchmore collaboration in the future than currently isapplied today.

Through the integration of these various proventechnologies, GME not only allows print-readymarketing materials and ads to be dispatched toprinters and publishers in the far corners of theworld in seconds but also makes it easy to produceair-ready TV and radio commercials and distributethem in minutes.

In a scenario reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz,GME effectively transforms the world of graphiccommunications from black and white to full, living,three-dimensional color. It allows us to create, per-fect, add to and also deliver content more easilybetween San Francisco and Singapore today thanbetween New York City and Newark, New Jersey justa few years ago.

As more of the creative development is managedonline, and much of it automatically, everything hap-pens faster and at less cost, and it is of as good andoften better quality.

The digital revolution enables businesses toexamine their working practices and to challengecurrent thinking about what can be achieved, howlong it takes and how many people it takes to do it.

Over the next few years, digital media exchangewill significantly change the way the graphic com-munications business operates. In this new reality,print producers who seize opportunities afforded bythe integration of digital workflows will operate moreefficiently and have more options to exercise forthemselves and their clients in an increasingly seam-less and increasingly global media landscape.

W O R K F L O W

New workflow managementtechnology is allowing clientsand service providers to workmore closely and streamlinethe production, managementand distribution of campaignmaterials across all forms ofmedia and to destinationsaround the world.

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