Trendspotting: Workflow Part 3 JDF Certification—Why Should You Care?

So far in our workflow series, we have examined the meaning of workflow and why it is important to our businesses as well as the importance of introducing lean manufacturing concepts in order to ensure that work processes are as efficient as possible. In this article, we turn our attention to the work being undertaken by CIP4 and the Printing Industries of America to advance the JDF standard and to make it easier for print service providers to ensure that investments in new technology will deliver the full benefits that JDF automation can deliver.

When the JDF concept was first introduced to the market by industry standards body CIP4 (www.cip4.org), many suppliers to the industry began incorporating JDF into their products. In the early days, suppliers could claim that their products were JDF-enabled, but there was no assurance that products from multiple vendors could effectively interact with each other in accordance with the standard.

That led to an arduous process of pairwise interoperability tests—meaning a pair of products, whether from the same supplier or different suppliers, would be tested in a controlled environment, with changes to the software made to correct any connectivity issues that were discovered.

This obviously was a very time-consuming process, and not sustainable over the long haul. To provide the market with better assurances about the ability to implement multi-vendor JDF-compliant solutions, CIP4 began developing Interoperability Conformance Specifications, or ICS, that would allow for product certifications.

Checking out the company to see whether they are participating in the certification program should be part of the due diligence of product selection.

The Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (PIA/GATF) raised its hand to act as the initial certification body, and Dr. Mark Bohan was brought on board to manage the process.

Bohan is vice president, research and technology, with Printing Industries of America in Sewickley, Penn. In his current role, he is responsible for all technical research, graphic services, environmental health and safety, and is the TAGA managing director.

He oversees the Supplier Advisory Committee and Research Committee for PIA/GATF, and is responsible for the development of the JDF product certification program for CIP4, coordinating the implementation of JDF-enabled products at PIA/GATF.

I recently had a long and very enlightening conversation with Bohan to discover where the certification process stands today, and what near-term advances are expected.

Printing News: Dr. Bohan, can you give us a little background on why the certification process was put in place?

Mark Bohan: The certification process was initiated by CIP4 in 2003. At the time, the JDF specification had been developed and there were lots of suppliers saying, “I am JDF this and JDF that, which didn’t really mean anything. Anyone could put an XML tag into their code and say they were JDF-enabled. That doesn’t actually give you any functionality or confidence about what the product is able to do.

George Ryan was COO of PIA/GATF at the time, and he negotiated with CIP4 to establish a certification process that would, in effect, put a validation stamp in the use of JDF. It was a difficult challenge, one that needed the right staff of people in place.

That is one of the reasons I was brought over from the United Kingdom to head up the program. It had to be set up in such a way that it was effective, detailed, but not cost prohibitive.

PN: Had the certification process been tried in the past for other standards in the industry?

MB: Yes. If we look back to CIP3 ink presetting as an example, that cost about $10,000 for certification, and only one company ever went through it. We obviously wanted a much broader adoption. The decision was made to use existing CIP4 tools, and no proprietary tools or information, both to maintain the unbiased nature of the process and to keep costs in line.

PN: How is this different from the earlier interoperability testing?

MB: The early interoperability testing was very much in a development environment. You had face-to-face meetings among vendors, and they put products together to see if they worked. This is a great development process; you literally have engineers rewriting the code as they go. But it is not efficient for a more mature marketplace such as we have today.

PN: So explain for us what the interoperability conformance specifications, or ICS, actually do.

MB: The JDF specification is over 1,000 pages and covers a wide range of functionality. If you are trying to communicate between an MIS and a prepress application, there is a lot of information you don’t need to pass. Most of the information in those 1,000 pages of specification is not relevant to this specific activity.

The ICS lays out the exact information that must be passed if you have communication between an MIS and prepress, or from a layout creator to a RIP. If you are establishing communication between an MIS and a press, the ICS specifies what information the MIS has to give to the press, and what information the press has to be able to give back to the MIS.

If an MIS is communicating with a press, I don’t care about cutting parameters or RIP settings. I care about particular things to do with setting the press up.

But coming back to the MIS, I want costing data from the press. The ICS sets those requirements for what is needed to have a functional interoperation between two different devices in two different parts of the production process.

PN: How many ICS are currently in place?

MB: There are about 25. The Base ICS has the basic operation of the specification itself. The JMF (Job Messaging Format) ICS covers anything where you are going to use JMF messaging. The MIS ICS defines anything that relates to a MIS. These are generic.

Then we have others like the MIS to Prepress ICS that would specify the bilateral information to be passed between a MIS and prepress system, as well as conforming to specifications in the MIS, Base and JMF ICS’s. These are all JDF 1.3 at the moment. JDF 1.4 was just released and there is no ICS for that yet.

PN: So for any product that is certified, the user can feel fairly comfortable that it will work with other certified products within the production operation?

MB: The key is to prove that we can put them together and get them to work. Do they have all the information that is required in the ICS? Pairwise testing is great. But you may be testing two products that have both transposed black and cyan, for example.

They interoperate but they both do it wrong. With pairwise testing, you don’t know if what you are testing is correct in the first place. The ICS set the standard for what is correct, and we test against those. So it goes beyond simple pairs of applications and applies to every certified application within the category.

PN: How many products are actually certified?

MB: At the moment, there are 35 certifications, and there are a few more that will be announced very soon. Compared to the CIP3 attempt, it is very successful.

The first certifications we did are in the fields of layout creation to imposition, which would be products like Preps or the Harlequin RIP. We did that first because it was the simplest and easiest. For each certification, there is a manager application and a worker application, one that is going to produce the JDF intent and one that is going to consume the JDF intent.

Other ICS we have in place include MIS to Prepress, MIS to Conventional Printing­—Sheetfed, and Prepress to Conventional Printing. Three others are currently in beta: MIS to Finishing, Commercial Web MIS to WebPress ICS, and Newspaper MIS to WebPress ICS. I am almost certain there will be certified products in those areas by the time Print 09 rolls around.

PN: What are the benefits to a manufacturer in participating in this program?

MB: From the vendor perspective, it greatly reduces the amount of custom programming they have to do. By utilizing the certification process, it locks them in to the main specification and eliminates the need to write so much custom code.

I also had an MIS vendor tell me recently that in order to sell product in North America, they need to be certified: This reflects the progress we have made in educating the printing community on the value of JDF compliance.

PN: What about the benefits to the printer?

MB: For the printer, while none of these solutions are likely to be pure plug and play, like a Bluetooth/USB linkage, it results in a significantly reduced installation cycle.

You have connectivity issues you have to deal with. But you will have much reduced set-up times, much less requirement for custom programs and less need to have IT staff to do that. It gives you the ability to build on your systems so that even if a company is not utilizing the full aspects of JDF at the moment, it can still spec it out to be JDF-certified so they know when they are ready to bring additional equipment online, they can bring it online in a more streamlined manner.

It also provides much more flexibility in a multivendor environment. Many factories will have a variety of vendors, even with the same type of equipment, such as two different brands of presses or stitchers.

PN: What about digital presses?

MB: An Integrated Digital Printing (IDP) ICS has just been released and is an area we are looking at doing within the next year. It is a bit more complex than some of the others we have done.

PN: What should buyers be looking for in this regard?

MB: Checking out the company to see whether they are participating in the certification program should be part of the due diligence of product selection. If a company already has one or more certified products, there is a higher likelihood that other non-certified products from the same company will operate effectively. They learn a great deal during the certification process, and that knowledge is generally spread to other product groups within the company.

PN: Where can people get more information about the certification process and the specific products that have been certified?

MB: There is a lot of information on the CIP4 web site, www.cip4.org, and they can also visit www.printing.org/cim.

PN: Mark, thanks for taking the time to share this valuable information with us.

Cary Sherburne is a journalist, author, and marketing consultant working. Her tenure in the printing and publishing industry has included positions at Xerox Corp., Indigo America, and Bitstream. She is a frequent speaker at industry events, a senior editor at WhatTheyThink.com, and has written three books. Sherburne can be reached at [email protected].