Christian Weyer is not afraid of the contentious statement. “We believe we are not using computers correctly,” he says. The first ‘We’ refers to Zaikio, previously Crispy Mountain, a software studio that was formed in 2012 to tackle seemingly intractable business problems head on, many caused rather than solved by computers.
Part of the problem surely stems from the evolution of computing, beginning with punch card programmed mainframes and mag tape storage through desktop personal computers that sit on every desk and have democratised computing, supposedly freeing up managers to be more effective. But in Weyer‘s world, we (the second we in his opening statement) have become slaves to the software. And now with mobile phones to extend computing into our pockets, we are carrying our chains with us. “Computers have made our lives more complicated, especially where business software is involved,” he says.
There is little incentive for developers to improve the user experience of business software: the purchasing decision is made at a level well above the person who will be using it, so user experience is less important than in gaming, for example. “We always want to write software that improves the process,” he says. “That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning.
“Take a smaller printer. He doesn’t know what the problem is, he is concerned about how to make more use of the press. His problem is not the orders received, it’s that there are so many touch points to each one. So the limiting factor to production is not the press itself, it’s the data processing and how streamlined the process is through estimating, procurement, collaboration with designers, various approval stages, to end up with print ready PDFs. And the problem is worsened by shrinking print runs and the exponential increase in the number of print runs. “Most printers are not prepared for that.”
The first attempt at solving this was the Keyline MIS. It used a standard taxonomy to describe any print job within JSON formats, had a library of APIs to help with integration and was housed in the cloud to speed implementation and keep every user on the same version of the software. It was not the nirvana Weyer dreamed of. “But we have learned a lot from Keyline,” he says. And Keyline continues as a viable MIS, within the new world as a component on the Zaikio platform.
This is the new name for the business, adopted after extensive checking in the foreign language dictionaries, and announced a year after Heidelberg bought Crispy Mountain and its development team. Heidelberg needed fresh input into the role of supplier to the printing industry and here was a company that had a similar vision of the future. Heidelberg recognises that for Zaikio to fulfil its transformative mission, it has to be free to operate outside of Heidelberg, hence it has not become a part of Prinect as the company’s previous software acquisitions have. Nor can JDF, the format that Heidelberg has championed for 20 years, do the job.
Weyer explains: “One vendor has to be able to talk to another. There has to be scaleability. The JDF approach is no longer up to the job. There are simply not enough software engineers to do what the industry needs. This results in bespoke pieces of JDF that work for one print company, but with no guarantee the same combination of systems at another printer will talk to each other,” he explains. “No one manufacturer can offer everything that is needed. The closed eco system approach is behind the times.”
Heidelberg had come to the same conclusion, he says, and rather than Crispy Mountain spending the next five to ten years developing something on its own resources, it decided to join the press giant.
“Heidelberg sees itself as just the starting point and we are therefore looking for other investors. We understand that we need other partners to join the Zaikio community.
“We have seen in many industries that the walled garden approach to data does not work. Through open systems, the individual share taken by one company may shrink, but the overall cake becomes much bigger. In this respect the printing industry is behind the curve.”
The low hanging fruit for Zaikio will be a procurement platform that begins testing later this year. In the first instance it will reduce the administration and time needed to order paper, and can clearly be extended for other consumables.
Shortly after, Mission Control, the data exchange hub that will carry out the transforms from one device to another will be released for testing. Behind closed doors testing is happening already with others able to apply to join this crepuscular stage of the project. “We are not creating a data exchange standard, but an actual product,” he says, though a standard approach to formatting is needed for the API to operate.
“The Mission Control central database will be where all the information about products and equipment will be stored. and this will be available to the software applications that printers are using and then delivering instructions to the production equipment.
“It is not a MIS and we don’t provide production planning or scheduling though we can store that information and make sure it responds to all relevant machines and software,” Weyer adds. “Mission Control tremendously simplifies connectivity, taking the cost of software management out. A printer can choose whichever imposition application is best suited to his business at any one time, which might not suit a different type of printer nor job type.”
Heidelberg will make its software systems available to Mission Control, opening the potential of supporting a mixed pressroom through a single seamless information platform. There are approaches being made to Enfocus to allow a connection to the Switch environment, extending the reach of Switch from prepress workflows into other aspects of production. There are discussions with other MIS providers, who Weyer reports are open to Zaikio’s idea.
“The business model only works if we connect as many different partners as possible. The documentation to tell other developers how to connect through the API is available online, free of charge.”
Much of this is about how data should be structured, taking a more modern and holistic approach than that used by JDF, a format devised for litho printing more than 20 years ago. Trying to make that fit with digital presses and other technologies that were not considered at the outset has been a cause of confusion and results in multiple interpretations and different implementations. All are slow to implement and many are relentlessly expensive. Mission Control should overcome this. It has a more modern semantic approach and uses industry standard tools that were not available 20 years ago. Applications can be connected through the API in just a few days.
And the way that the data is structured means that there is no room for interpretation in how to structure data for the software developers.
A printer with the Zaikio system running the business will see the MIS he is used to as well as data presented at each piece of equipment in the way he has been used to seeing it. There is almost no opportunity for that data to be inaccurate or inconsistent. And the system gains the flexibility to adjust on the fly as circumstances change recognising that the production schedule agreed at the start of the day is unlikely to reflect how jobs had been produced at the end of it. A new imposition, for example, can be changed five minutes before the job hits the press.
Mission Control is based in the cloud, fenced off from the Mission Control account belonging to another printer by industry standard security protocols. In implementing this sort of mission critical cloud solution, a print company ought to operate two internet connections for redundancy and resilience, says Weyer, repeating that the data a printer has in the cloud is his alone and is under his control. If an application requests access, it has to be expressly given.
Some applications can remain locally hosted, on ripping, for example, will need to be as close as possible to the point of need. “It’s not about throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Weyer explains. “Likewise JDF is going to be around for many more years. It’s about finding a nice migration path, finding a way to do this step by step.”
Christian Weyer wants to change the way the industry thinks about automation and collaboration through Zaikio.
