Print MIS: Is it the Center of the Workflow Universe?

Originally appeared in GATF World magazine, August 2006
By Chuck Gehman

SIDE CHART:

Benefits of Integrated Print MIS and Workflow

1. Integration with print buying customer’s business processes can help “lock you in” to steady print volume, increasing revenue and improving profits by decreasing costs
2. Print MIS system must provide “hooks” to Internet applications, and to production systems which will decrease chances for mistakes, and help provide better customer service
3. Integrated Print MIS and Workflow systems that handle content and commerce transactions, eliminate job prep and re-keying of job information, eliminate disparate pricing and content management challenges provide a streamlined business and production workflow
4. Much of Prepress Production and Planning can and should be done at the time estimates are created (automatically), resulting in less time and effort to move jobs into production when they are won
5. Integration between MIS and Workflow eliminates redundant entry of job information, and lets you react to both internally and externally generated changes more quickly, and increases the likelihood that you will get paid for customer-requested changes, and that you’ll gracefully handle internal-generated changes

According to Frank Romano, it is the complex jobs where the real money is to be made. According to Frank, complexity involves things like multiple substrates in the same job, multiple printing technologies, foil stamping, embossing, fancy bindings, and the like. We can take this thought one step further by embracing the new idea that there’s real money to be made by seamlessly integrating your printing business with your customer’s complex business processes— and it is very possible that today, this might even be of higher value than actually employing complex printing processes.

Since there are now a variety of alternatives print buying companies can choose from that can deliver the same or better measurable benefits (web pages, email blasts, even quick printing), at lower cost, than what they procured from commercial printers in the past, it obviously becomes even more important for printers to be more efficient—both in order negotiation and processing, and clearly in production tasks. These issues, and a litany of other marketplace changes have been covered in detail in many articles in industry publications, result in almost universal agreement that it has never been more imperative to work faster and smarter on every job.

In the past, Print MIS systems were viewed as costing and estimating systems, augmented by bolting on accounting, shop floor data collection and production monitoring tools. However, the new reality is that the combination of new technologies in Print MIS, with a focus on the integration of content and business workflows, is rapidly changing how printing companies employ their MIS solutions, and how work is done in the plant.

The marketplace is changing so much, and so much of the traditional work the printing company used to perform has moved up stream to the print buyer that it is essential for Printers to focus on streamlining core business and manufacturing processes, and making it easier for customers to work with them. Inside the printing company, things are in a constant state of change. Printing company staffers are doing different types of work than they were 10 years ago, and they need to do it more quickly and with a focus on serving customers. To do this, they need access to more and better information, and they need to be able to find it without looking at multiple systems, and they need to be able to distribute jobs and data across the printing enterprise-- automatically. Today, Print MIS systems can deliver manufacturing process improvement, as well as make it easier for the printing company to provide world-class customer service, by adding CRM (Customer Relationship Management) functionality and integration with customer-facing Internet systems.

The key takeaway is that a Print MIS system today must consist of a suite of integrated tools for managing the printing enterprise, addressing both content and commerce, and must provide a greater degree of flexibility to open the door to new business opportunities, with both existing and new customers.

Customer Integration

Integration within the walls of the printing plant has been the subject of much discussion in the industry, and topics like CIM and JDF are of great importance, but let’s cover the beginning of the workflow first: a potentially more important source of business improvement is the integration between Print MIS and workflow systems inside the printing company, with systems at our customers.

Everyone in today’s “information economy” is a content creator, whether it’s a secretary sitting at a desk producing reports, a sales person in a Starbuck’s working on a pitch, or a graphic designer working in a studio at an Ad Agency—everyone is generating content that needs to be published in one form or another. Certainly, there is a wide variety of technical expertise out there on the creation side of things, ranging from knowing nothing about print processes, right up to knowing more than our own staff at the printing company.

Depending on your target market, you may choose to focus on only one kind of customer, with a specific set of expectations and experience, and that may work well for you. Your company may only focus on the most high end customers in the New York market, for example. For most commercial printers, when a business opportunity comes in the door, it is necessary to respond appropriately no matter what the customer brings— there lies the challenge: solving the customer’s business problems, while processing their work in a cost-effect and profitable way (that is basically invisible to them, since they don’t really care about the hoops you have to jump through to get work out the door.) The key is to make it easier and better for the customer to choose your channel for their media spending, rather than the many other options that are available to them.

Internet Systems

Customer-facing systems, integrated to Print MIS, are certainly the wave of the future in integrating content and commerce, and are being employed by an increasing number of printers today to grow their business. This is a key touch point where integration with customer business processes and systems can add value to your workflow.

A Scalable Content and Commerce Workflow

Transaction volumes are increasing, we know that. We’re getting more, shorter jobs that need quicker turns than ever before. We must be able to scale up our systems to meet the demand. We also need to provide a compelling value proposition to customers, to make sure their transaction volume comes to us.

Even the simplest job (say, 10 copies of a sales presentation created by a user in Microsoft Powerpoint, plastic coil bound with clear plastic front cover and black vinyl back cover, color pages, 8.5x11, any paper, 3 tab separated sections), if produced and delivered as part of a supply chain that is tightly integrated with your customers business process, could be of far higher value to a customer than it would be to them walking into a quick print shop to have color copies made of an original they printed on their desktop inkjet.

• Customer (an end-user, document owner or creator) sitting at their desk in corporate America visits their company’s Intranet Portal
• Clicks on a button for ordering Print
• They upload content (which is automatically converted into a PDF) and use a wizard-based job ticket to specify the print product they want
• They see a preview of the job as it will be produced, and approve it
• They get an automatic price online
• They pay for it
• It is sent to your print shop
• You produce it
• It’s delivered to their office (or to another address, or addresses they specify)

Benefits for Customers

This workflow provides valuable benefits to your customer’s company by addressing numerous problems they face. First, you’re going to help them enforce their corporate document standards, by limiting the choices the user can make for how their document will be produced. Because of such standards, and because your company can offer more sophisticated options for the document production and finishing, the resulting document you deliver to the end user is more professional-looking than they can produce in-house. The customer’s finance department is happy because they get a lower cost per page than if the user printed it on their desktop inkjet, or on the color copier down the hall. The customer’s purchasing professionals are happy because they are in complete control of which vendors provide printing (in this case, you). And they can see who in the company is using print and in what volumes, and perhaps even charge it back to the end user’s department via cost centers or other internal charge codes.

Benefits for the Printing Company

For the printing company, this is what today is being described as “enlightened self interest”. By providing this integrated technology solution (“built-in” to the customer’s employee portal, and connected to their finance and purchasing systems), you are solving important problems their company is facing, while at the same time locking in a steady stream of business. The benefits to you, in addition to the steady revenue stream, continue when the documents the customer orders enter your workflow-- ready-to-print, via the Internet, minimizing labor in your operation and increasing profits.

You have also eliminated order negotiation for these small, quick turn transactional jobs (except at the inception of the program), because the pricing is pre-established—no estimating each job, which in many cases with small digital jobs would cost you more than the profit on the job itself. Another big workflow benefit is that approval cycles are minimized or eliminated, through soft-proofing integrated into the portal. At the time the customer orders, you’re most likely getting paid, too (whether via a corporate purchasing card or credit card)—improving your cashflow. Finally, many of these jobs can go directly to digital output or to plate, completely eliminating your prepress labor.

Integration: Not just for the Simple Jobs

As Frank Romano points out, there’s money to be made from complex printing processes. VDP (Variable Data Printing) and cross-media personalization are state of the art examples of that thought process. Various industry studies have shown that Printers can make more money doing complex VDP than by producing commodity print pages. And they are also a great example of emerging applications that Printers can use to integrate with customer’s business processes and extending value to your customer’s own customers and prospects, by combining print and mail with the Internet (via both email and web sites).

These types of programs are harder to implement than our previous scenario, and require competencies in VDP, database, Internet and web technologies. They also require the ability of the printing company sales professionals to move up the “food chain” at customers, to sell to marketing people and “C” level executives (CEO, CMO, CIO, etc).

Fortunately, for expertise you don’t have in house, you can buy or partner with vendors for the aspects of these “campaigns” that you might not be able to deliver on your own. Deploying these types of programs provide even more lock-in within a customer organization, and can result in very high profits, moving you altogether away from commoditization

A typical campaign might include a personalized Direct Mail postcard, which makes a compelling an offer to the customer, often including some gift or “reward” for the recipient taking the time to respond. This postcard includes a compelling offer, along with a URL the customer can use to get their reward.

The customer then gets a “media rich” email (with design elements and graphics), making a similar offer, and which incorporates branding elements similar to the printed piece they received, perhaps with a slightly modified URL from the direct mail piece, that they can click on. We now know the source of the “customer lead”—from the printed piece, or the email, and we can track the effectiveness of both offers and the type of media employed.

When the customer comes to the website, they are identified and are often asked for some additional information to get their reward. This could be in the form of selecting from multiple choice questions, or typing in information. We are now populating a database that can be used to target the prospect even further. Subsequent mailings in the campaign can use this information for increasing levels of targeting and personalization, to refine the offers made to the customer, and to increase the likelihood that they will buy.

The goal is drive the customer to a purchase. A typical workflow for such a campaign, with an integrated solution connected to a Print MIS system might look like this:

• Marketing Staffer accesses the corporate marketing portal via a web browser
• They “build a campaign” by walking through a wizard-like interface, on the fly, selecting who they wish to target, choosing the offers they want to make, and the media they wish to employ (ie., postcards and/or emails)
• They choose their recipients via an integrated mailing list manager, using geographic segmentation (i.e., zip codes) as well as demographics (I.e., Female, 25-34 yrs old, home owner)
• They customize the offers with text and graphics based on their current analysis of the marketplace and the prospects being targeted, choosing from pre-defined assets in a library that you host, or uploading additional elements, or even selecting from a form
• They select the timing for each aspect of the campaign, building a schedule for the mail drops and email blasts
• They see a preview of the job as it will be produced, and approve it
• They see a price and automatically compare it to their quarterly budget
• They pay for it
• Your VDP workflow solution automatically configures all the pieces necessary to produce it in your print shop
• You workflow automatically assembles the elements of the job into production plans
• Your Print MIS system lets you manage the schedule and execution of the campaign’s various elements (printing, mailing, email blasts, etc), across your production operation, and over a matter of a few days, weeks or months.

Print MIS and workflow integration are key drivers for success in VDP applications, because of critical deadlines, mailing and database processing, as well as tie-ins with fulfillment, digital and offset processes that must be managed together as an integrated solution.

Integration within the Printing Plant

Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve watched many labor-intensive processes within the printing plant disappear. With the advent of Computer to Plate, all of the manual labor associated with film and plates has gone away and, at this point, no one misses any of those activities. Proofing has moved from being a very expensive proposition, to something that can have little or no cost to the printing company, whether done with inexpensive Inkjet devices or via soft proofing.

Press automation, Ink Key Presetting and color controls, have all improved quality and enabled us to face the challenges of shorter jobs and quicker turns in the pressroom. Because there have been such great benefit to printing companies from these initiatives, much effort has been placed to date on integration focused on Print MIS and press systems interoperability.

EFI has achieved demonstrable success with a number of customers in partnership with industry leaders like Heidelberg, Komori and MAN Roland. Customers are recognizing the benefits from these solutions today.

The CIP4 consortium (www.cip4.org) now has more than 300 companies contributing to the development of the JDF specification. Remember that JDF is not the same as CIM, but it is—importantly—the emerging standard for implementing CIM applications in a printing enterprise.

JDF is designed to streamline information exchange between different applications

and systems. JDF is not the same as CIM, but it is the most important, standardized way of implementing interoperability and integration in a print CIM environment—integration between printing systems and software applications. JDF is designed to allow integration of heterogeneous products from multiple vendors to enable seamless workflow solutions. JDF, through its Job Messaging Format (JMF) component, provides the ability to implement two-way communication between business and production systems.

The next area of process improvement is the labor intensive area of prepress workflow. Not only do printing companies continue to spend a lot of time prepping customer jobs for production, but are often faced with challenges managing the workflow and keeping track of costs associated with prepress production.

Workflow and Print MIS integration employing CIP4’s JDF (Job Definition Format) specification is on the verge of dramatically changing this. Many companies in the industry are working together under the auspices of CIP4. For our part, EFI is working closely with vendors like Agfa, Artwork Systems, Heidelberg and Screen to implement connections between our Print MIS solutions and those companies’ popular workflow systems.

JDF today at this time isn’t the be-all, end-all of integration. There are still many applications where proprietary solutions or custom integration are necessary. JDF isn’t plug and play, either—two vendors solutions need to be tested together to confirm interoperability. However, there is real value to be obtained today by using JDF integration between a Print MIS system and a workflow system.

Print MIS and Workflow Integration with JDF

JDF provides software-readable (as opposed to human readable) “job tickets” that describe a job in detail (for example, the job initiates in the Print MIS system— when the job is won, the estimate is turned into an MIS job ticket). Once the job is ready for production, the JDF ticket is sent to the workflow solution. While the job is running, and when it is completed, the JDF provides a methodology for returning costing information back to the MIS.

Diagram 1: JDF Integration between Print MIS System and Workflow System

The information exchanged between the MIS system and the workflow system can include such details as references to the job files (for example, their server location on the local area network—or in an asset management system), color information, details on plates to be produced, if proofs are needed and if so, what type of proofs (for example, page proofs or imposition proofs).

Were it not for the JDF integration, this information would have to be entered manually into the workflow system—increasing the possibility that errors will be introduced. A sad example would be a CSR (customer service rep) typing an incorrect number on a work order, and as a result 1000 books are trimmed to the wrong size. Another example would be the simple transposition of two numbers: 25 instead of 52. That could result in a product being completely incompatible with a target finishing device or page layouts being compromised. JDF eliminates the keying and re-keying of information between multiple systems, dramatically reducing the opportunities for errors across all production processes.

In terms of collecting costing information, the alternative to JDF is to use manual data collection. Production staff will have to fill out forms, or type on terminals or into a web browser, to capture the history of what happened in production for you to be able to “see” that data in your Print MIS. New Print MIS systems, featuring JDF integration, completely automate the collection of data from prepress processes. We can see and capture all the activities taking place in the workflow, without requiring data entry on the part of staffers.

Core MIS Functionality and Workflow Integration

There are a large number of touch points in the MIS system that affect workflow, whether involving customers or internally. There’s a real need to understand how a job will fit into the workflow, even before it’s inception—before it is won. The reason is that the price you charge the customer may well depend on both production capacity and marketplace factors. A Print MIS system, integrated with your workflow, lets you see the real time picture of where your business stands, and helps you make decisions accordingly.

Estimating and quoting

Many printing companies treat estimating as a way to arrive at a price to quote a customer. While it is certainly well established that estimating is actually focused on developing a cost for the job, the process of creating an estimate for a job can result in the collection of technical specifications of how to produce the job.

Modern Print MIS systems allow the specifications about the job to be collected (either by printing company employees or by customers) via user-friendly web-based tools that walk the user through the process of providing the information necessary. Some web solutions, for simpler jobs, use “pricing engines” to determine the cost and sell prices of a job, based on a series of simple specifications the customer has provided.

In either case, if we’ve done this properly, we now have virtually all the information about how to produce the job, and the Print MIS system can just “roll” that job into production automatically. It shouldn’t be a separate process once the job is won to create production plans and job tickets to push it into the queue for production on the shop floor. Of course, there are bound to be changes between when the job is first estimated and quoted, and when the customer actually buys it from you—the flexibility inherent in an integrated solution should optimize your ability to handle such changes.

Someday, our Print MIS systems will interface directly to the JDF components in Adobe’s Creative Suite applications, for example. This would serve two purposes: First, it could be used to communicate to the Designer (or more accurately, tell the Designer’s software) the capabilities the shop has. Second (and this is possible to a limited extent today with Adobe’s use of JDF in these applications), it will be used for communicating the designer’s vision of how they want their job produced—seamlessly and automatically between their software and the software in the Print MIS and downstream workflow solutions.

Planning

Planning and Estimating should go hand and hand, and when integrated should result in a great many fewer “touches” for job to go from a winning bid to production. Planning determines the most effective way to produce a job. When Estimating, Planning, Scheduling and Workflow are integrated, a job should flow easily into production and the integration should be flexible enough to take into account the actual workflow and capacity available at the time the job is scheduled. Since we already have the information in the Print MIS that describes the job, planning should be as simple as pushing a button.

Workflow generally focuses on finishing first. What are the requirements for the job? How does that affect the page imposition? What sheet size(s) are compatible with the end product? What bindery equipment is located on-site versus work that must be outsourced? What is the bindery workload; will a bottleneck in that department cause the job to be late? What makes most sense for an individual job, in-line or off-line? These are just a few of the aspects of finishing an automated digital workflow must take into consideration early in the workflow process.

Imposition

Since Planners are often responsible for creating impositions, ordering paper and other consumables, handling buy outs and scheduling outsourced tasks, the need for complete, end-to-end integration is obvious. You’ve estimated the job based on certain parameters, it’s planning and execution should be driven from front-to-back by automation and software, flowing between the MIS and the workflow system.

Your goal is basically to take the customer-supplied content files and “pour” them into the workflow. Now that you have an error-free color-managed set of files, the next step is to actually produce the output, either by generating plates for an offset press or preparing the file for printing on a digital output device, or in the case of a hybrid workflow, quite possibly to both. Push a button and the Print MIS system sends the job into the workflow: it’s imposed, plated and ready to go on press (when the schedule says it’s time is here).

Scheduling

Individual scheduling elements for a job may change multiple times during the process as various priorities across the printing enterprise are juggled. In an increasingly complex and fast-paced environment, scheduling that isn’t integrated (or done manually) can cause significant workflow inefficiencies. As a result, many shops are moving to more automated, dynamic scheduling software. Such automation can enable the consolidation of the planning and scheduling steps.

Summary

Remember how shocking it was initially as cameras, vacuum frames and entire stripping departments (as well as the people who staffed them) began to disappear? When you look back now, however, it’s almost hard to imagine doing business in that incredibly labor intensive way. We are headed toward the same kind of epiphany over the next few years, as we see the total integration of content and commerce workflows take hold. We’ll look back with wonder about how we were able to function and meet customer demands.

Print MIS systems, coupled with workflow integration, are rapidly changing the way printing companies do business internally, and with customers. The resulting competitive advantages are impossible to ignore, and in fact should be embraced wholeheartedly by success-driven companies.