Many printers will be familiar with having a medley of disparate makes, models and machines crowding up the pressroom floor. This might be the results of an investment strategy over years that opted for the one-upmanship of picking leading-edge technology rather than stick with an exclusive supplier. In the cases of mergers, integrating the equipment list from acquisition targets create a hotchpotch of makes and models.
For consolidated print groups, this has often led some kind of production pastiche on steroids. Large multi-site players like Blue Star and Geon have had to streamline scattered sites and incongruous ranges of technologies.
In Melbourne and Sydney, Geon runs Heidelberg’s Prinect pressroom manager for its Speedmasters, while in pre-press, a Kodak Prinergy front-end sends files to pre-press for the Speedmasters and also to its Xerox and HP Indigo presses. Geon has also developed proprietary systems for its digital production to handle the complexity of variable-data printing, says Sam Carter, digital business development, northern region.
“This provides Geon with the speed and flexibility required for our customers while keeping to one standard pre-press solution for digital and one for offset, simplifying both workflows.”
There are combined and separate areas for offset and digital. Carter notes a balance between Geon creating commonality and retaining flexibility in its systems to respond quickly to the tighter turnarounds for digital. “In addition, some digital work requires specialised skills. Geon adds workflow resources as required to ensure we are meeting the needs of our clients.”
Carter says specialisation means determining the best of both types of workflow, litho and digital, and taking advantage of them to improve overall productivity. “This enabled Geon to take the best colour calibration standards from the offset workflow to apply it to the digital. It also enables us to take the best practices from digital estimation
and apply them to offset. For Geon, integration is an ongoing process, and is not the case of one area integrating into another, but creating a new and improved workflow for the business.”
The group has worked through the inevitable teething problems in hybridising its workflows, adopting a rigid implementation solution with support from its vendors, internal resources and product specialists.
The business case, according to Carter, is creating the best of both worlds for its customers. “Much of the time, digital press output is as good or better than offset output. Once the quality concerns are removed, the best argument for a hybrid workflow is that it gives flexibility to the production team, and the ability to provide the best solution that meets the greatest range of customer needs.”
Adelaide’s Hyde Park Press produces diaries, yearbooks and short-run self-published work. It uses Agfa Apogee to impose all files, whether they go to chemistry-free Azura TS plates for its three Heidelberg Speedmasters: a two- and a five-colour SM 102 and a five-colour CD 74, or direct to its Canon 7000VP ImagePress for colour and Océ VarioPrint 6320 Ultra duplex for B&W.
Hyde Park’s pre-press manager, Phil Gibson, says there is potential to automate further, so Apogee will drive the ImagePress direct, viewing it as a device within Apogee, but presently the system simply creates a PDF that enters a hot folder on the ImagePress software. Full automation “will be our next step”, he says.
That said, Gibson is quite happy with the present configuration. “It’s good having a PDF to check. Our pre-press is upstairs and our digital print is downstairs, so it’s good to be able to
look and see what will be printed.”
The hybrid workflow has been running for a year and was integrated without headaches. Before that, digital impositions were manual. “We’d drop the files as single pages into the digital machines, then use the onboard EFI Fiery digital software to impose them. It does imposing to a limited degree, but is a little less exact.
“Under the hybrid Apogee workflow, because we’re preparing files for the Heidelberg presses, it’s easier for us to do it the same way for all jobs, so we don’t treat the digital jobs as any different to the offset.”
Gibson says at the quoting phase, Hyde Park’s clients are generally aware of the different technologies and the business cases underpinning them, such as quantity, specialties like fifth colours or metallics, price and turnaround time. For black-and-white work, quantity is the lynchpin in deciding between the Océ and offset, as three-figure runs are far more cost effective in digital.
Approval is straightforward – a digital proof from the press, or a sample off the Canon or Océ machines. There is the ability in Apogee to switch jobs between digital and CTP but he finds that rarely occurs, with most jobs classed as one or other at quoting.
In the bindery, digital jobs are still a bottleneck, says Gibson, as short quantities have to be factored into the operating costs of saddlestitchers and perfect binders. These run offline to finish generous volumes of litho output without any productivity hassles. But running them offline to finish 100 digitally printed books really ties up the kit. “It works out to be expensive,” he says.
Hyde Park is considering dedicated digital solutions, such as the integrated Horizon perfect-binder add-on for the VarioPrint, showcased at Ipex.
Opus Print Group runs a hybrid set-up at Ligare in Sydney. Opus chief executive Cliff Brigstocke sees it as a flexible means to offer customers the best of all possibilities, even in the same project – for example, 50-100 books printed digitally on its Océ or HP Indigo colour machines, followed by higher volumes from the same files on its Speedmasters.
The backbone is a Prinergy workflow, with files prepared in Prinergy and queued for the platesetter, through imposing, RIP and Epson proofing. They are either queued in PrismaWeb, which directs them to an Océ printer, or in an HP portal for Indigo.
Opus has developed IPALM (Integrated Print and Logistic Management), a proprietary online platform that enables content delivery from pre-press to binding to straddle offset and digital at multiple sites, including ‘pick-and-pack’ and ‘web-to-print’ scenarios.
Not all workflows need to be integrated. At Brisbane’s Valley Edge, there is sheetfed with its pre-press CTP workflow, digital production printing, and recently also large-format.
Plates for sheetfed work on five- and two-colour Heidelberg Speedmasters are processed on an Agfa Avalon N4 thermal setter using Azura chemistry-free plates – all within Agfa’s Apogee workflow. Files for a Canon ImagePress 6000 are ripped in EFI Fiery, while files for large-format work on a new Roland DG VersaCamm V6 640 eco-solvent printer are processed in Roland DG’s VersaWorks.
Rocky Cassaniti, managing director of the 22-year-old company, tells ProPrint: “The reason we have them separate is that we can’t afford for one system to go down and because of the nature and size of the files, we really need to have separate RIPs so we can process more efficiently.”
Cassaniti says the reasoning behind separate workflows is the structure of the business, with signage and printing in separate departments. Within the printing department, discrete litho and digital workflows eliminate the risk of downtime from RIP problems.
Quality requirements and unit prices – on runs up to 50,000 A4 sheets – determine if a job goes CTP, while timely turnarounds on short runs favour the ImagePress; all of it discussed with the client beforehand.
In a high-res PDF workflow, incoming files go to the pre-press department for preflighting. By then, the job will have been quoted as a digital or offset project. The client is supplied with a final proof to sign off, or if the artwork was designed in-house, a designer will sign off. The file is then either ripped on the Fiery for the ImagePress or sent to an Avalon setter.
“As it’s PDF, it doesn’t matter which destination it goes to at that point. Obviously, we can’t print PMS colours on digital,” says Cassaniti.
At Print 2005 in Chicago and Ipex 2006 in Birmingham, Heidelberg and Fuji Xerox first demonstrated interfaces between Prinect and FreeFlow. Heidelberg’s Prinect Digital Print Manager was the hub at which digital files created in Xerox and HP Indigo systems could be integrated into Prinect’s JDF/JMF flow.
Since then, Xerox has furthered its integration with Prinect and also with Fujifilm’s XMF workflow to enable printing businesses to choose between CTP and digital. The cross-technology handshake is firming, encouraged by rapid improvement of digital press output, colour management and substrate choices. The PDF/JDF/JMF workflow has been adopted across the divide.
Using Prinect, Kodak Prinergy, Screen TrueFlow or Fuji XMF, businesses can seamlessly integrate digital services and offer colour-matched flexibility with Xerox FreeFlow and Colour Managed Workflow, says Fuji Xerox Australia workflow manager Peter Brittliff.
HP developed SmartStream, with plug-ins to Prinergy and Prinect for Indigos. HP graphics director Shane Lucas says SmartStream’s portfolio “provides end-to-end workflow management, from job creation to fulfillment, with specific solutions to address key market segments”.
Heidelberg ANZ’s pre-press and workflow manager, Soeren Lange, says Prinect has plug-ins for SmartStream, NexStation (Kodak NexPress), FreeFlow and Canon’s Helix workflow. PDFs are dragged from offset to digital folders, and if JDF-enhanced, will also contain data for stock, number of impressions and inline finishing. Imposed sheets are exported to the digital device as a print-ready PDF, or a preflighted PDF can be sent to the device, with imposing done on the digital front end.
Through its Digital Press Management platform, Prinergy offers bi-directional JMF options for NexPress, DocuColor, Indigo and Konica Minolta devices, says Kodak Australasia’s business manager Michael Smedley.
Digital Submit enables drag-and-drop interfacing for creating and submitting digital jobs as static PDF/PostScript files, and as VDP formats, such as PPML, VDX, PPML/GA and VPS.
Agfa’s Apogee Digital Print Link enables Apogee Pre-press to integrate with Canon ImagePress, Indigos or with the Creo Colour Server (CCS) software RIP and flexible workflow solution, OEM’d by various vendors to drive a broad range of digital presses, says Agfa Australia software support Clint Bolton.
Fujifilm’s XMF is integrated with Adobe’s PDF Print Engine (APPE) for smoother convergence of CTP and digital production. Screen’s TrueflowNet, incorporating APPE, offers pre-flight software, colour conversion, imposition, trapping and ripping in a web-based client-server environment.
Why hybrid?
• Combine traditional and digital print workflows
• Boost ICC colour profile consistency
• Create raster (bitmap) and vector (scalable) PDFs in the same APPE renderer
• Switch between PDF/X-1a (early) or PDF/X-4 (state-of-the-art)
• Integrate your MIS for real-time job submission and progress reporting
• Control impositions and simplify proces-sing of imposed jobs
Case study: Five Star Print
Should the job go litho or digital? It’s a key issue at the quoting stage, but the good news is that your management information system (MIS) should be able to find a solution automatically.
Carolyn Cagney (pictured), managing director of Adelaide’s Five Star Print, says the firm’s Da Vinci MIS auto-matically selects the most economical printing for any project from various offset and digital devices.
Five Star runs three Heidelbergs – an XL 105 six-colour plus coater, a CD 102 two-colour perfector and a five-colour SM 52 – and a 40-inch Komori Lithrone. They are all fed by a Kodak Magnus thermal setter.
A NexPress has joined the digital fleet, which also comprises an HP Indigo 5500 and a Konica Bizhub C650. A separate signage department sports two Mimaki flatbeds (solvent and UV), and HPs and Epsons. A Prinergy workflow, upgraded from 4.2 to 5.0, links offset and production digital, and third-party MIS products. Cagney says when Five Star initially bought Prinergy, “it was the Rolls-Royce of workflows” and has proved itself since.
Meanwhile, Da Vinci iQuote is able to interpolate times and running costs to indicate the optimum device for the job, litho, laser or Indigo. This does away with double quoting for offset and digital. Cagney anticipates that the wide-format equipment will also be integrated into iQuote, eliminating multiple quoting on multi-faceted projects.
“I’d like to see it all streamlined – one pre-press department instead of three,” Cagney tells ProPrint.
“It would be nice to see all operators located in one area, multi-tasking.”Jobs are imposed on Prinergy’s Preps and ripped once only. Using Prinergy’s Rules Based Automation, if a new destination device is selected, the files are simply re-imposed, saving time and maximising integrity.
Five Star has a digital finishing area with a UFO folder, drills, creaser, guillotine and spiral binder. Cagney says the logistics of digital, with its micro-runs, has also encouraged the development of integrated onboard finishing.
The Konica Minolta Bizhub can sort, staple, saddlestitch and punch (two- and four-hole). But unlike pre-press, the bindery that can seamlessly switch between litho and digital output remains a pipe dream.pro
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