A Vision for Managing and Moving Digital Assets

The story of Networked Graphic Production, an industry initiative to improve digital asset management and workflow.

As this column has suggested numerous times in the past three years, the packaging industry often models the commercial printing industry in technology adoption—if not in development. We've been predictably just behind the commercial world at employing PostScript, CTP, color management, and PDF. If the trend follows, we could be glimpsing our own future again by looking at the work being done by the Networked Graphic Production™ Partners. This group, just 2 years old, is an industry trade initiative aggressively aimed at the adoption of the JDF file format. Its story is an interesting one, and the outcome of Partner efforts should bode well for label and packaging printers of every ilk and size.

Back in October 2001, at PRINT '01, prepress equipment supplier Creo launched what it called the Networked Graphic Production (NGP) Initiative. As Roger Graham, NGP Marketing Manager describes it, the company basically made a formal statement to the industry that it was driving towards "solutions that are integrated across the [graphics] production chain; and that will deliver the benefits of automation and electronic collaboration with print customers."

That's quite a mouthful, but what Creo did to back it up was equally ambitious. For the next 12 months, the NGP team essentially de-constructed the print production process, identifying each transaction and assessing the need at major junctures for automation and integration. The company examined not just the key systems within its obvious prepress domain, but also looked outward to creation, press, post-press, and to the administrative and business management systems that overlay it all.

"We found that our industry is populated with 'silo' systems that each do their job very well, but don't communicate with each other. That lack of communication, from system-to-system and vendor-to-vendor prevents us from implementing technology that could provide better managerial visibility and control over manufacturing as a whole," says Graham. He admits the NGP initiative was an internal gut check for a company that offered hardware and software solutions that couldn't always "talk" with one another.

According to Graham, the NGP team was also at this time involved in the work being done by CIP4—the organization writing the specification for the JDF. "It was a real eye-opener for all of us to see technology coming down the pipeline that could bridge the gaps between systems and connect the manufacturing cycle from idea to delivery," he says.

JDF is the über application and file specification for capturing and communicating print manufacturing data. CIP4 is the organization writing and publishing the code, which is now some 700 pages long. The group's objective is to compile a dictionary of graphical production terms and data, and to define how those terms are to be universally expressed and shared. In essence they are creating a new language for information and electronic instructions in the printing world.

The NGP team was already committed to JDF as a solution platform when they made their next important move in October 2002. They launched the NGP Partner Program by bringing into the initiative three other companies: business systems developer Print Cafe; PDF and desktop software giant Adobe; and press manufacturer Komori.

Creo had been working with Print Cafe and their collaboration was already present in Creo's Synapse® Link software, which automatically exchanges prepress production data between database-driven print production systems and an MIS. Synapse Link is the type of connection the Partners were looking to build across all the major printing functions.

As the four Partners further explored the logistics and implications of applying a common language to their equipment, it became obvious the program would benefit by having more Partners. "We grew quickly from a Creo initiative to an industry-wide concern," says Graham. The Partners opened membership to other qualified vendors, and six months ago Creo turned over control of the organization to the Partner companies. There are currently 30 hardware and software developers participating in the program.

Graham explains that in order to be eligible, a Partner company must be committed to the development path of the entire group—which means building integration points using the JDF specification. Partner companies must also articulate their "value proposition" to the group. "You have to agree to go in a specific development direction, and you have to agree to put up the resources to accomplish it," he says.

The new NGP Partnership is governed by a Steering Committee made up of Partner company volunteers. Their mandate is to build a sustainable organization that can support its directives and deliverables. Then there are four Working Groups whose mission is to get into the technical aspects of integration. Volunteers in the MIS & Production Planning, Creative & Prepress, Press, and Post-press working groups define the critical and desirable printing transaction data points to share. They're also responsible to the Partnership for their own company's R&D efforts conforming to the group's objectives. In addition, NGP has a Membership Committee that vets and assists new Partners.

"The value of joining the Partnership is economy of scale," says Graham. "For example, if you're a press manufacturer, and you want to integrate with MIS systems, you can work within a targeted group to build integrations and collaborate with over a dozen of them here. That's faster and less expensive than developing on a one-to-one basis." The NGP Partners are already at work to achieve their next goal of demonstrating new JDF-enabled solutions at Drupa 2004.

The value of the Partnership to printers, tradeshops, and converters should be even greater. "What we plan to accomplish is to accelerate printing equipment vendors going to market with JDF-enabled products that collect, use, and share data with other systems. This enables all of our joint customers to reduce operating costs and increase efficiencies as a result of seamless integration," says Graham. Once that requisite has been met, the printing world could become a very different place.

By: Terry McConnell