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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.