I was noticing an interesting trend when discussing a series of trends in printshops I had been visiting. I have been visiting printing facilities for over 25 years as a consultant. In the first part of that career, the prepress service was often even a separate specialist company (engraving), until eventually, prepress services were brought into a printshop proper. Adding scanning, proofing, and film/plate output capabilities just made sense, and prepress was an industry in need of synergistic relationships. In particular, as customers began to demand delivery of digital content. Since they [digital prepress] were the new guys in the printshop workflow, they kind of were allowed to be somewhat on their own. They often had their own set of rules, set of financials, and they worked as a company within a company almost. As one owner of a printery told me once: ‘As long as they keep these babies running (motioning towards the pressroom), I really do not care about what they do in prepress’.

I have seen that it is an almost ubiquitous trend lately however to take prepress seriously, and even go a step further, MIS integration. Adding MIS terminals or check-in/out points on jobs seemed a bit awkward in the early stages of digital prepress, and for good reason. Nearly every job was an adventure, and predictability and repeatability were a gamble at best. Just getting a job out in the early stages of digital prepress was a commendable achievement. It was not long however that the honeymoon for digital prepress was over.  Printers began to focus upon efficiency and predictability in prepress, and the costs incurred in it were under scrutiny. So, production co-ordinators, job planners, and CSRs are increasingly interested in the job status and scheduling in the prepress department.

I made note to myself, the stark contrast with the aforementioned apathy towards digital prepress, as it was now, ‘No matter what solution we choose, it must integrate with our MIS’. That requirement, itself was remarkable, the complete change of mindset that prepress is not just a necessary evil, but a critical part of the print workflow.

"How hard can it be? I am sure I will need help from an integrator or VAR, but…”

Well, it is all a matter of scope and expectations. The MIS playing field is narrowing somewhat, mainly due to market consolidation of the number of MIS vendors. Also, unlike digital prepress production software that evolves and updates frequently, MIS systems prefer stability. An MIS is rarely updated voluntarily, and if it is it is usually for a good reason, such as compatibility. This means that if you are using a legacy MIS, and desire to add JDF functionality for example, it may be time to discuss its upgrade path with your MIS vendor. Often, an MIS one is currently using is already somewhat JDF capable, and can be used to integrate prepress job status roles.

The real solution and schedule for implementation comes from planning what you want to keep up with in the prepress department. Typically, this is best performed with a consultant or an integrator, unless you employ 24/7 professional programming staff. Developing a plan to determine the goals of MIS integration with prepress, allows one to minimise the requirements, and minimise the implementation details. By saying ‘I want to track ‘jobs’, ‘consumables’, and ‘machine queuing’, for example gives an integrator a starting point. This integration is not as difficult as it may sound, to pass prepress job status IDs, and consumables/consumption variables to a MIS database.

The CIP4 (cip4.org) specification for JDF offers a lot of simplification in the process of making an MIS interface. Since an MIS is essentially a database of jobs and customers, it is often important to custom-build an interface with ones prepress department. Workflow automation solutions to provide preflight and real-time job-status are possible with JMF messaging, and if implemented, a live-status prepress job-board can be implemented with your MIS.

MIS integration for automation can bring great benefits to production

Many facilities are adding wide-format proofing or output, often in their prepress departments. By using an MIS to track what type of job or media type a job uses, that interface can allow an imposition tool to queue jobs according to media types. For example, automated imposition of jobs can be tracked by looking up MIS job intents, and using it to gather jobs to efficient media usage, and all jobs of a certain media can be gathered on one imposed output. Automatically queuing all jobs to appropriate devices or queues for proofing, gloss, canvas, backlit, based upon what it sees as its job type is in the MIS. That is a really great ability to add, with a marginally simple JDF or MIS integration.

MIS integration can give your workflow automation intelligence. Most MIS systems have extensive media and inventory control module capabilities. These systems can use their knowledge of ‘how much media do I have for device x versus device y, and how do I make most use of my devices without media changes’, without adding that capability to prepress systems. Those are the kind of reasons that I am seeing that MIS integration is not just a nice thing to have, but a basic level requirement for prepress and MIS planning. It is a change [the requirement that future prepress solutions integrate to MIS] that I am welcome to see.

MIS integration is not the sexy part of prepress, but it can well be the profitable part. There is a lot of knowledge that is built into MIS job and media planning and it is only logical to make use of it in the historically rogue-variables of prepress and digital printing. Your employees already know your MIS, and how to use it, so integrating your prepress media queues and inventory are logical next steps.

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