Driving The Digital Route

Hard copy originals? Get with it! To increase efficiency, boost quality and cut costs, in-plants are digitizing their workflows.

Most in-plants are accustomed to handling jobs that are crucial to an organization's success, but when the documents you're producing deal with classified test results on components for new military weapons systems... well, let's just say it's important that the workflow process be handled as efficiently as possible.

That's why the in-plant staff at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory are working overtime on a project that many other shops also find themselves tackling: to assemble and streamline the most efficient system of digital workflow possible.

"You'd think in this day and age someone would have a system set up that runs so perfectly everyone could go out and use the same thing, but that's not the case," says Jean-Luc Devis, operations manager at the lab's Laurel, Md., in-plant. "Everyone's got a different way of doing their work, so we're forced to come up with the system that's best for our own situation."

Two years ago, that's exactly what Devis set out to do. His 17-employee shop—which handles low-run, quick turnaround jobs ranging from stationery to brochures to classified test results—had operated efficiently for years but had yet to turn the corner into digital workflow. Management, swayed by the convenience of e-mail and the University's intranet network—not to mention the potential long-term savings in time and money—encouraged the transition.

Today, the in-plant is transitioning from hard copy to digital submission, and the shop's 4,000 customers have a couple of digital routes to send jobs to the in-plant. For stationery and business cards, the shop maintains a Web site where customers can re-order with only a few clicks on the keyboard. The information then resides on the file server, which service reps check every day for new orders to be forwarded to prepress. At prepress, the information is cut and pasted into a PageMaker template, which is then sent to a Panther platesetter.

"Its been a real time saver," Devis says. "Business cards, labels and stationery are turned around much quicker than they used to be. We also have a PDF online, so anyone who hasn't already had cards [printed] and needs a signature approval can print out the form right away."

The most impressive digital workflow system, dedicated to sending and receiving work for color copying, has also proven the most challenging for both in-plant staff and customers. The shop relies upon three locations that are geographically separated with four color copiers, all networked to the file server. Customers can then go to the Web site, fill out a work request and send the actual document as an attachment—much like an e-mail attachment that browses your hard drive and selects the document you're sending. The attachment goes to the file server, which reads it as two files: the work request and the job itself.

Routing To The Right Copier

"We wanted them separate so we could open the request and see what kind of job it was and what equipment it best fit," Devis says. "That way we know if it's a two-sided job that certain copiers are better suited for, if it needs coated stock, and so forth.

"As soon as the job gets to the server an e-mail is automatically sent to the three copy centers, so they all know there's a job waiting and can look at it. Depending on their availability, they'll then select the best machine for the work that needs to be done. It's different than having a customer direct it, because we're allowing our operators to pull down and determine what jobs they want to do on what machines."

Despite early successes with small jobs, Devis anticipated the system would not get off the ground running, and he was right. It's something for other in-plants to keep in mind, he says, since much of the trouble resulted from differences between programmers aiming to operate the system most efficiently from their point of view and the fact that such methods were not always compatible with the user-friendly needs of the everyday operators.

"It took several months to a year to get things up and running, so it's a very lengthy process," Devis says. "What you end up doing in the meantime is loading drivers on people's PCs so they can access the system directly to send work, but that means they're sending it to the unit itself, so the customer is then specifying what machine the job is going to, which is not the way we wanted. If the machine's down and all the stuff is sitting in queue, you can't send it to another machine anymore."

That, of course, meant occasional logjams on some machines and downtime on others—exactly what the system was supposed to prevent. Since the shop handles some 800,000 color copies a year, the matter was no small problem in the early going.

"The customers seem pretty willing, but there are times it's really difficult and frustrating for them to send a file electronically, so we really need to hold their hands and get them through it," Devis says. "Once we get everything down pat it'll be a lot better, but it's that learning curve at the beginning that's the most difficult. That's why we do it one on one, and try to put information on the Web site. It's a tough process to educate people, especially when people send a file and they're not 100 percent sure that what we're receiving is the right thing. Some of them want to learn, but others just want to give you the job and have it come back finished."

Devis has a few items on his wish list. The in-plant does not offer digital document storage, and DocuTechs have proven too costly an option at a time of so many other upgrade expenses. But that's fine with Devis, who says that with so many changes already underway the shop would risk getting in over its head by adding more.

In the meantime, many staff members are enrolled in courses outlining the latest in digital workflow techniques. Devis says the goal of trying to stay one step ahead of customer needs is definitely being met.

"For certain jobs we've definitely saved time, and with other jobs you could probably pop the plate and throw it on the press quicker," he says earnestly. "We spent probably $40,000 for our computer-to-plate technology, and we're not recovering that in the prepress area in the next couple of years. But what we are doing is educating our staff to be better prepared for the new technologies as they come in. So there's a training element there where people are becoming more up to speed, and that's definitely got a dollar value as well."

Keeping Up With The Customers

The situation is a bit different at University of California-Berkeley Printing Services, where it was actually the customers who encouraged management to modernize rather than the other way around.

The in-plant, which has a UC system-wide customer base but competes with outside shops on bids, handles a variety of presswork ranging from book covers to posters to annual reports, along with DocuTech digital printing and basic copying services. But in a city nestled close to the Silicon Valley, digital workflow was the only option for many customers.

"Sometimes the customers actually drive us to stay state-of-the-art rather than us driving them," says Prepress Manager Will Clipson. "Some of them are very digitally minded, and to keep them you've got to be able to service them. I would say we were having trouble keeping up with 20 percent of our customers."

As a result, the in-plant now has two digital workflows. Customers submit files via disk or by sending them to the file transfer protocol (FTP) server. From there, jobs are generally routed toward a high-resolution Scitex imagesetter that outputs plastic plates for use in single-color work, or film for the production of metal plates on multi-color work. The color jobs are then printed on one of the shop's multi-color offset presses—either a six-color Heidelberg 102 or a five-color MAN Miller TP95. Direct-to-plate jobs are produced on a two-color Miller TP95 perfector. Jobs can alternatively be sent to one of the shop's DocuTechs or to a Xerox Regal for color copying.

"We're at the point where our high-end prepress department has saved us a vast amount of time," says Clipson. "In fact, we've been reducing our staff through attrition. We lost six people out of 26, didn't replace them, and frankly the productivity gains have made up for it."

Not that it was easy in the beginning. Clipson says it took more than a year to smooth out the kinks in the system. He encourages all in-plant managers to use an ethernet network capable of 100-base data transfer speeds if they expect large amounts of data to transfer rapidly.

"The 100-base networks are about 6.5 times faster than the regular 10-base network, and the upgrade is fairly easy and inexpensive to do," Clipson explains. "If you look at a workflow, the digital prepress workflow had a lot of latency in it, meaning a point where your operator was waiting for the machine. With the advent of multi-output computers and this 100-base, it has vastly improved this latency in the workflow. People are not standing around as much, and that's had a huge impact on productivity. I think it cost us less than $10,000 to upgrade all our hubs and the workstations, and it was very much worthwhile."

The shop carefully preflights data received from customers, checking for correct fonts and file links with the assistance of software. Clipson maintains that preflighting can be much more than a necessary evil, however.

No PageMaker Prejudice

"It can really be a way of binding your customers to you," he says. "We do a lot of PageMaker work, and the industry as a whole doesn't like PageMaker. But we've found that's a prejudice; it's not a real limitation of PageMaker. So by training ourselves to work with PageMaker, we have bound certain customers to us because that's what they prefer. So we always try to learn an application the customer prefers to run well enough to support it."

When it comes time for proofing in the direct-to-plate workflow, technicians rely on the Scitex post-raster files, which are viewable bitmaps that dictate instructions to the imagesetter.

"We take that raster file, run it to an HP plotter, then fold it out and use it in place of a blueline," says Clipson. "To save cost, we're looking to supply some customers with unimposed laser proofs instead of blueline or HP plotter proofs."

The shop uses a Sun server attached to a DLT (digital linear tape) jukebox to back up and store data, as well as a separate database to track images. With about 30 percent of jobs repeating on a yearly basis, Clipson says they could charge for such document storage but at this point have approached it "as a value-added service, a way of building loyalty."

Minor improvements to the system will continue, but Clipson says he can already brand the shop's digital workflow efforts a success.

"We'll do a job in four hours that we couldn't have done in a week before," Clipson says. "The designs have gotten much more complex—there is no way we ever could have put enough people in the building to do it in the past. And these jobs are routine now. The complexity and quality of the work is like night and day. It's really a quantum leap." IPG