The Job Definition Format was first revealed at a Seybold conference at the height of the dotcom boom a dozen years ago. A packed room in the San Francisco conference centre heard how each piece of equipment a print business might have would communicate with each other, eliminating much day to day decision making.
Job tickets would disappear to be replaced by a job file which would automatically change settings and alert the next device in the process that a production step was underway. To do this each job would have a digital file describing that job according to an agreed hierarchy of information expressed as an intent written in XML.
This descriptor could be understood by the different suppliers to enable their machines to accept the instructions contained and at output create XML for the next step in the process and at the same time feed progress data back to a central point where production management could make sense of the data and automatically implement adjustments to keep a job on schedule.
Those listening returned to their companies fired up that they had heard about the future of the industry. Four years later at Drupa the first implementations of JDF began to emerge and the fervour spread to print companies and commentators: Drupa 2004 became known as the JDF Drupa.
Since then the momentum behind JDF has slowed. It has proved difficult to devise a common taxonomy of terms used. Does a page have one or two sides? Is it the whole area of a sheet of paper, or just the final trimmed size? While there was enthusiasm for the idea of an open exchange of information, suppliers provided equipment described as JDF compliant but which needed an extra investment to unblock that compliance.
And limitations to JDF’s approach became apparent. In order to reflow a job from a B1 press to a B2 machine to overcome a scheduling problem, or because of a break down on the night shift say, the whole job needs to be re-entered at the MIS. Job ganging is possible, but only if every job on the sheet has the same run.
The biggest problem, however, is that JDF describes a way of working that was dominant at the end of the last century, litho and relatively long runs, with closed production networks. It was built on the success of Cip3, the computer integration of prepress and press.
The supply of colour curves from the platesetter to the press to set ink ducts and other parameters for a job. This is such an accepted part of every printer’s workflow that it is effectively disregarded. The logical extension by the organisation holding the keys to Cip3, was to included post press processes and to include a communications element to report real time job data to the MIS. In 2001 Cip3 changed its name to Cip4 and became the guardian of JDF.
Today it manages the different groups that work on elements of the standard, runs the Interop meetings where vendors test the theory of linking different products, and does what it can to promote the use of the standard. There are around 300 members, the majority being suppliers, but printers can also join.
The Cip4 website lists three UK printer members, a packaging repro company, a prepress specialist and a solitary printer. The prepress company EC2i has effectively abandoned JDF and has developed its own APIs to automate the processes it needs to automate. The third company is Remous, an SME printer in Dorset.
Remous managing director Alan Bunter joined “because I’m very passionate about JDF and keen to learn about it. But when you become a member you quickly lose the will to live because it is so far removed from reality and from what people want. It is impossible to understand.
“JDF is a great idea and should work and it should make SME businesses a lot more efficient because this is what we need. The number of orders we handle has doubled while the sales price has halved and it is very hard to manage this. I saw JDF as the safety net so that we didn’t miss anything and all the set ups should be accurate.
“We did the exploratory work, speaking to all our suppliers about how to go about it, but everybody runs away. They say they are JDF compliant until you ask them. It needs to be closer to plug and play.”
This is not to say that there are no printers in the UK exploiting JDF, many are to a greater or lesser extent. ESP The Colour Hub has linked Tharstern MIS, Kodak workflow and Heidelberg presses in an automated network that deploys JDF connectivity. Equally Henry Ling in Dorset and Sterling Solutions in Kettering are using JDF to help cope with shorter print runs and faster turnarounds.
Lance O’Connell of Heidelberg UK says: “When the JDF concept was new it was really something to talk about, a concept suppliers could create a story on. Once there had been a couple of early adopters and suppliers had proven its authenticity and learned more by implementing real life JDF workflows it went quiet but it is becoming a serious topic again now.
“The technology is mature and printers recognise they need to reduce costs and increase efficiency and are looking at workflows again. There have been some successful cases, others want to emulate these. The interest is coming not only from printers buying new kit and taking the opportunity to upgrade workflows but also from those with established equipment who want to get more from it.”
Nobody expects that connectivity would ever be as straightforward as creating a computer network, and that there should be a learning curve. However, the pain barrier would seem to have been set too high.
For those that endure the suffering there are rewards, says Keith McMurtrie, managing director of MIS provider Tharstern. Most MIS suppliers have signed up to Cip4 as the role of the MIS is crucial to JDF. Current managing director of Cip4 is Henny van Esch, director of Optimus. Tharstern has been an advocate for JDF based automation. McMurtrie says: “There are still not enough people using JDF, even though nearly every system has some level of JDF built in.
“However, there are businesses that can’t so what they do without JDF. They will have gone through the pain barrier to make it work and once they’ve done that find that they can’t look back.
“It means that when they invest, everything they buy must fit into the JDF workflow. The problem is that while they are reaping the rewards from the investment in time and effort, they do not want their competitors to know.”
But McMurtrie also acknowledges that JDF is not the silver bullet it was hyped to be. “It’s a mature standard, part of a bag of tools that printers can use. They should not get hung up about it being JDF or not.”
The aim must be to automate to eliminate repetitive administrative tasks as Remous has identified and that may be achievable without JDF. When it was conceived, digital printing was in its infancy and was not represented among the original members (though Heidelberg at the time offered the Nexpress in its portfolio).
Consequently JDF is only now expanding to include a specific version for digital printing. Likewise web to print was not considered in the original meetings and has not been part of the specification, though it should be included as part of the digital print extension.
Version 1.5 includes specifications to support aspects of wide format printing, including multiple jobs on a sheet, to support rereeling of digital jobs, variable data print and support for barcodes in digital finishing set ups. This is the first upgrade since 2008, an epoch in technology terms and perhaps indicative that since the economic crisis, major vendors have been concentrating on their internal problems rather than on accelerating development of JDF.
The hiatus has meant that different solutions have emerged that do not depend on JDF for automation.
It has meant printers have wanted to automate the handling of jobs being submitted online, they have had to rely on MIS vendors and web to print companies to come up with the interfaces. Fortunately wider internet protocols such as Web Services provide a means to do this. Linking to a customer’s SAP or Oracle business system can be more important than the purity of the JDF used internally.
The question of purity is another key issue. Where JDF has lacked elements specific to a supplier, that supplier has been able to adapt JDF for his own purposes. Thus JDF provides the fuel for the Heidelberg Heidelberg’s Prinect production management network, but it can be difficult for a third party provider to hook into an existing network.
Where companies like Tharstern have done this over a number of installations and so learned what is needed, this is not a real problem. But for the smaller software developer it can be problematic and may require an inappropriate amount of time and cost to achieve integration with different vendors.
This can also account for the cost that printers baulk at when asked to pay several thousand pounds for each piece of equipment needed to link to a network. It can seem that JDF acts to stifle innovation.
At Workflowz, UK dealer for Enfocus Switch, managing director Alan Dixon says: “People thought that JDF would be the silver bullet to solve integration issues, but it’s not as relevant as they thought it would be. Developers have taken JDF as the backbone and added their own nodes to access information and as a result systems start to become proprietary again and these become different flavours of the standard.”
EFI has seen this happen. Elli Cloots, senior product marketing manager, says: “One of the problems with JDF is that there are too many ‘variations’ of JDF. Too many vendors have much interest in their variations, which takes away the ‘plug & play’ goal of JDF. On top of that a lot of companies went into survival mode and just didn’t have new technologies such as JDF on the top of their priority list. EFI remains a big believer in standardisation and continues to put a lot of effort in this through organisation like Cip4, for JDF specifically, but also in other areas.”
According to the Cip4 website, across the whole of the print universe of different products from imposition software to bindery, there are 219 integrations in operation where at least one product is JDF Certified and 39 integrations where both products are JDF Certified. A matrix of which company is working with which shows 577 interfaces either confirmed, available, installed or in progress.
Perhaps the matrix is the appropriate format. In setting out to be all things to all printers, JDF has become bogged down, backward rather than forward looking, suitable for a limited number of businesses rather than reflecting the experience of the majority of printers in business today.
At UK MIS supplier Optimus, where automation is an ingrained part of the culture of the company, there remains support for JDF, but it is tempered by the changing nature of the industry. Its newest MIS product is Dash which can work with any substrate and any process to find the best way of delivering the intended product.
Managing director Nicola Bisset says: “Dash is simply so flexible, while JDF is not flexible. You have to start with the estimate and return to the estimate if production needs change. JDF does have some value and there are a lot of JDF enabled workflows because it provides a structure. A printer needs to ask what it is they really want to achieve and if you understand what the expectations are then you can work with the MIS to get there. In many cases that is information coming back to Optimus using the JMF element of JDF. In many cases JDF is just part of the solution rather than the whole solution.”
That does not invalidate JDF. Cip4 has taken integration of different systems and suppliers in the industry further than any other organisation. With the industry shrinking and with traditional vendors still in survival mode rather than looking to expand, the need to link different systems as easily as possible has not gone away.
Integration is essential, but JDF may no longer be the best way to deliver this.
EFI has seen this happen. Elli Cloots, senior product marketing manager, says: “One of the problems with JDF is that there are too many ‘variations’ of JDF. Too many vendors have much interest in their variations, which takes away the ‘plug & play’ goal of JDF. “On top of that a lot of companies went into survival mode and just didn’t have new technologies such as JDF on the top of their priority list. EFI remains a big believer in standardisation and continues to put a lot of effort in this through organisation like Cip4, for JDF specifically, but also in other areas.”
