Invisible Touch: As Prepress (D)evolves, It Has Becoming Strictly 'Hands Off'

Many of us are old enough to remember a time when “prepress” referred to a collection of distinct processes, many of them mechanical. You made negatives and stripped the film into flats. You made photographic color separations. You made plates. In fact, there used to be entire businesses devoted to just one or two of those processes. Computer hardware and software and related peripherals have whittled away at those prepress processes. Remember color separators? Once a $12 billion (in 2014 dollars) industry, the entire color separation business was essentially replaced by a single command in Adobe Photoshop.

“We were visiting one of our customers a week or two ago,” said Greg Bane, Pressero channel manager for Aleyant Systems, a developer of web platforms for the graphic arts industry. Pressero is Aleyant’s software as a service (SaaS)-based web-to-print portal. “He brought us into his ‘prepress’ department which was now two guys. He said, ‘I used to have about 10 people here. I’m doing more work with two, given all the tools we have.’”

It’s no secret that prepress as a discrete process is gradually being absorbed by other parts of the production process, from graphic design and production at one end, and the RIPing/printing on the other. In analog printing process, computer-to-plate has taken steps out of the process (filmmaking/imagesetting, stripping). Digital printing goes one further, and take platemaking out of the process.

The theme to all of the changes to what we today almost quaintly refer to as “prepress” is automation.

“The most important trends around prepress revolve around the substantial progress the industry is seeing in process automation,” said John Henze, vice president, Fiery marketing, EFI. “With some of the advanced technologies available today, very little manual intervention is needed, and that is substantially different from where the industry was just a few years ago.”

Concurring with that sentiment is Robert Ross, CEO of Xanté, which provides PDF workflow and imaging solutions for graphic and prepress applications, including its latest iQueue X Universal Color Workflow released in early December 2014. "Controlling labor costs in the shop is huge," Ross noted. "Frankly, it is the difference between staying in or out of business for most of our customers."

Automation in some sense began with computerized pagination systems and CEPS, but serious attempts at automation had its roots in the mid 1990s and for a few years around the turn of the millennium one couldn’t attend a DRUPA or a Graph Expo without hearing about JDF and Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM—remember that?). There was hype, then there was a backlash—and then JDF slowly began to catch on and become widely adopted.

Look, Don’t Touch

The phrase that crops up more and more when talking about overall production workflows—especially prepress—is “as few touches as possible.” That is, it’s necessary to send a job through the system with the absolute minimum of manual intervention.

“Especially on short-run jobs, every touch point is a cost, in a way,” said Julie Watson, VP of strategic marketing for Ultimate TechnoGraphics, a developer of automation software such as the “classic” Impostrip imposition software. “Time spent trying to manipulate a file is a cost, and is also more error-prone, so the automation environment has to be quick.” The company’s Ultimate Bindery takes automation one step further and can send a job all the way from prepress through finishing untouched by human hands.

For Xanté the focus is on simplifying processes such as controlling color and matching spot colors, Ross explained. iQueue is a multi-user prepress workflow designed specifically for digital color printing. It makes it easier to manage multiple digital files, make independent CMYK/density adjustments, match critical spot colors, select line screens, apply imposition, estimate job cost, track consumables, run counts, and share digital files -- from multiple workstations. One of the firm's goals is to reduce the knowledge level that is required of operators. "We have multiple reports of secretaries running our equipment at customer sites," he added. iQueue version updates now are released about every six months, so look for the next one in mid-2015.

As workflow automation becomes more powerful and prevalent, humans are only needed when there is a problem, but even common problems can be fixed automatically.

“In the digital print space, automation is relatively simple and quick using a variety of tools available for EFI Fiery production environments,” said Henze. “Solutions like EFI Fiery Command WorkStation, Fiery Image Enhance Visual Editor, Fiery ImageViewer, Fiery JobFlow and advanced preset, hot folder and virtual printer tools virtually eliminate issues that have downstream impact like missing fonts and low-res images, as well as address more complex issues like matching brand colors.”

One of the challenges that digital printing has presented printers is aggregating a large number of short-run jobs to make up for what would have been a comparatively lucrative long-run offset job. Part of this is a sales and marketing problem, but once those jobs are obtained, managing capacity becomes the challenge, so automation and efficiency are necessary to move jobs through the shop as quickly as possible, all the while maintaining quality. Thus, automation becomes a competitive advantage.

“Companies who do not have automated prepress departments are starting to panic,” said Fabian Prudhomme, vice president of Enfocus. Enfocus’ Switch is a workflow automation tool that allows both print buyers and print providers to automate repetitive tasks, preflight and fix files, collaborate, and it can link to many third-party applications. “We see that companies that have not automated are kind of left behind. Executing the same task takes them a lot longer than their automated peers.”

“Estimate that each step [in a production workflow] takes five minutes,” said Watson. “If I have 25 jobs in a day, [automation offers] a lot more savings than if I have two jobs in a day. That makes a difference.”

Whether it’s automating entire workflows, or just bits of it, the need is for speed. A lot of what we can consider “automation” is built into common production hardware and software. “We are seeing more and more requests for automating preflighting and file fixing for jobs coming out of the Web 2 Print online storefronts  with systems like Tucanna tFLOW," said Greg Salzman, president of Aleyant Systems. “This ensures that the production process downstream is error free, and greatly reduces the chance of having to do costly reprints.”

“The pressure that’s been put on the shoulders of company owners and why automation is so important now is there’s a declining business in commercial print,” said Prudhomme. “The pie has gotten smaller, so the more efficient organizations, hence the more automated ones, can get a bigger piece of that pie.”

Appy Feat

If you’ve been to a trade show or perused the New Products announcements in this magazine, you’ve no doubt seen more and more emphasis on mobile prepress apps—for smartphones and/or tablets—and while its tempting to see that development as jumping on the mobile app bandwagon, accessing the workflow from mobile devices is becoming important for practical reasons.

“There’s a demand [for mobile apps] in a sense that the prepress manager will be mobile, going around the plant,” said Watson. “If they have multiple plants, or if it’s a relatively large facility, they’re pretty much walking around. Now that they’re walking around with an iPad or a smartphone, they can easily access job information.” Easy access to job information better serves customers when they have an inquiry, and it also increases efficiency when a decision needs to be made about a job or a specific problem.

Apps can also help with another trend: centralizing prepress.

“We see companies wanting to centralize prepress,” said Watson. “They may have more than one plant, but they want to centralize how and where they do the prepress.”

There is one other fast-evolving trend that may also solve centralization issues: the cloud.

Cloudy Weather

“From ourselves and from other suppliers, there is a lot of effort in ‘cloudifying’ solutions,” said Prudhomme. “This is an evolution that’s been set in motion and is unstoppable. Within two to three years, we’re going to see a major revolution, not only in the printing industry but in prepress departments because a lot of prepress applications that are running locally will be running in the cloud. I really think it will be the big story at DRUPA 2016.”

Cloudification of software in general—and prepress software and other functions in particular—has benefits for both users and for suppliers. For users, there are no worries about having an out-of-date or unsupported version of a product, and specific jobs, tasks, and information can be retrieved anywhere and everywhere—or at least anywhere there is an Internet connection. For the suppliers, it means a better, closer relationship with customers, and they can see in real time how users are working with their products. They can respond more quickly with tweaks and other improvements and enhancements. “One of the benefits of the cloud is that the relationship of suppliers and end customers will be taken to an entirely different level,” said Prudhomme.

“Software as a service will become more important in our industry,” said Watson. “There are no set-up costs and you can get kickstarted with professional prepress systems. This is where we were going by launching Ultimate Bindery 4 with the potential to have it as a cloud service. We definitely 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 automating the estimating function—you can get real-time pricing. But it can automate a lot of the proofing 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 file 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 website and go through a collaborative process where they’re doing automated preflighting. 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 define 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 workflow to “play nice” and communicate with each other.

“Bringing all those systems together is still a big headache for many companies,” he said. “They have color software from this supplier, imposition 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 manufacturers,” 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—challenging print marketplace.