Quick Printing

FEB 2015

Quick Printing is the resource for the Commercial printing, visual and graphic arts industries. Since 1977, Quick Printing has focused on improving efficiency and increasing sales and profits in the print shop. Industry experts share their ideas and

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Quick Printing | February 2015 21 MyPRINTResource.com For more information, visit MyPRINTResource.com/10004688 For more information, visit MyPRINTResource.com/10004781 feel that there's going to be a trend toward this." Self Serving At the very front end, the kinds of tasks that are considered "prepress" are becoming blurry. To what extent could web-to-print be considered prepress? "It depends how web-to-print is used," said Aleyant's Bane. "Web- to-print is typically looked at as auto- mating the estimating function—you can get real-time pricing. But it can automate a lot of the proofng functions, too. You can argue that it also does a lot of prepress functions. Whether you'd want to include that as part of the prepress department is another question." You say "potato"… Still, another trend of "prepress" is fostering closer collaboration with the customer— and enabling the customer to be a bit more self-service. "Say there's a fle ready to go," said Bane. "The traditional approach is series of phone calls, e-mails, 'change this,' 'change that,' 'here's a new proof.' Now there are a lot of tools that will allow you to put it on a web- site and go through a collaborative process where they're doing auto- mated prefighting. Everyone can see feedback from each person, and see a revision history. It's bringing the customer to become a tighter part of the overall process." Automatic for the People Regardless of semantics and how you want to defne prepress and what tasks are part of it, the fact remains that automation—in all its myriad forms—is going to be the prevailing trend. "We grew 36 percent in 2014," said Prudhomme. "That's the biggest growth we've had with Switch. We see the deployment in automation projects growing exponentially compared to last year." A big part of that is the desire on the part of shop owners and managers to get all the various parts of the workfow to "play nice" and communicate with each other. "Bringing all those systems togeth- er is still a big headache for many companies," he said. "They have color software from this supplier, im- position software from this supplier, a RIP from this supplier, an MIS system from that supplier—and they want to bring all that together. They want a system or platform that allows them bring all these systems together." "One of the main challenges is most of the environments today are a combination of different manu- facturers," agreed Watson. "This multivendor environment needs to be optimized. JDF has been a very big enabler of this. It's also accessible to small and medium-sized operations and not just very large companies." Which only makes those smaller businesses better able to compete in today's—and tomorrow's—challeng- ing print marketplace.

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