Making the Move to Variable Data Printing

In-plants interested in variable data printing should take things one step at a time.

By Chris Reid

Whether you're a small reprographics shop or a large offset printer, the prospect of supporting variable data printing (VDP) applications for your customers can be daunting.

Many shops lack the IT skills or infrastructure to handle VDP. They may not be familiar with typical variable data formats or the composition tools used to build variable applications. Still others haven't made the leap to digital print technology in order to support a fully variable page for color or black-and-white printing.

You may be at a crossroads where you need to make a decision about investing in VDP. Or perhaps, you require variable data printing to grow your business and satisfy the demands of your customers. Regardless of your situation, any business decision requires sound numbers to come to a conclusion about a pending investment.

The first step is to quantify the need by answering questions like:

• Do you have enough digital print business in the pipeline to justify the costs?

• Are there enough long-term contracts to support the investment? Or are you going to invest in the hardware, software and other considerations based on one or two short-term contracts or new leads?

• Can you absorb the risk if you lose these deals?

• Can you move short-run offset work to digital devices to defray the cost?

• Where else can you acquire digital pages?

Finally, you should think about how much variable data printing you're doing now and what volumes you will see over the next year, two years and five years out. Reviewing this information ahead of time will help you choose the correct device and help you make decisions down the road.

Getting Started

Once they've made the decision to implement VDP, many print providers start small with a digital cut-sheet device that also operates as a copier to help defray the costs of moving to digital. Devices like the IBM Infoprint 2090es and 2105es offer walkup copy, scan, e-mail and digital print capabilities for cut-sheet applications.

The most basic method of producing VDP is through simple mail-merges with Microsoft Word and Excel documents. These can produce small variable data applications and output as PostScript or Portable Document Format (PDF) and provide a typical entry point into the variable data market for many in-plants. These tools can be used to take a customer's MS Word file and Excel spreadsheet, perform a simple variable data placement and output the merged data to a printer.

However, there are output limitations since a simple mail-merge from MS Word will generate an entire page of PostScript or PDF for every page that you need to print. This generally results in large files to manage and data that RIPs slower than the printer can output, leading to poor printer performance and decreased utilization.

As your operations grow, you will need to move to an application that will allow you to run more efficiently and limit output file sizes that eat up disk space. More advanced tools like Objectif Lune's PrintShop Mail or QuarkXPress plug-ins allow you to complete more complex variable data applications using familiar tools, such as PDFs or Quark for page layout. PrintShop Mail also gives you the ability to cache static information to be placed on the page at the printer to present smaller file sizes and run much more efficiently.

Other tools like PlanetPress allow you to build more complex applications and output even more efficient data streams, as well. While these applications are typically used for cut-sheet black-and-white and digital color printers, they can also feed pages to high-volume continuous-forms printers to provide some scalability.

Lower cost applications such as PrintSoft PreS, GMC PrintNet and Elixir DesignPro allow you to compose applications through a simple graphical user interface or through scripts. These applications require more skills and a better understanding of data formats, either from host-systems or large databases. But these tools are capable of producing PostScript or PDF and many other data streams, as well as AFP. Tools for building even more complex VDP applications and outputting AFP include offerings from Document Sciences, Group1, Exstream and ISIS Papyrus.

Moving to Continuous Forms

When your digital print volume reaches several million impressions per month, it's time to look at continuous forms devices such as the IBM Infoprint 4100. These printers run at up to 1,220 impressions per minute and 600 dots per inch. (Exact speed varies depending on document complexity, system configuration, etc.) They can also print MICR, the magnetic characters used on checks, efficiently at the same high resolution. Reaching these volumes requires a more sophisticated application that is very efficient at building and managing the print stream, especially with complex variable data applications.

AFP is one of the predominant architectures used in producing transaction documents such as financial statements and utility bills. Worldwide, billions of variable data pages are printed every year using AFP. Most likely the phone and utility bills you receive at home or view online are created using this architecture.

AFP was developed by IBM over 20 years ago and is the de facto standard for variable data printing. Vendors such as Océ, Xerox, IBM and others supply hardware and print software that take advantage of its capabilities. It is an object-oriented language that allows the print server and the printer to manage static and variable data efficiently and accurately.

Creating a Communications Link

When using AFP, the print server that drives the printer converts the AFP data and resources (images and logos) to Intelligent Printer Data Stream. This creates a detailed communication link between the print server and the printer and allows the print server to understand where each page is at any given moment on the printer. This "handshaking" is critical for transaction printing.

AFP can give you the confidence that each page of your customers' applications can be printed correctly. That's why it is used so often in transaction printing, because it can help ensure that any single customer's statement prints correctly.

For example, if a continuous forms or cut-sheet printer jams, the AFP architecture supports full error recovery and notification. The printer can automatically recover to the last good page and manage the integrity of the output from print head to stack, whether cut-sheet or continuous forms.

Customers who want to print non-transaction output can also take advantage of AFP when printing short-run books or any other output, because the underlying architecture is the same. While missing or duplicate pages may not be as critical in a book as with a bank statement, it's a competitive advantage that you can offer your customers.

IBM is currently expanding the AFP architecture by helping to move it to an even more open standard. Participants from across the industry have joined the AFP Color Consortium to redefine AFP for color printing. IBM is doing this to further support color printing efficiency and to ensure that the color printed on one device accurately matches the color printed on a different device. When the application is printed on a black-and-white printer, the colors can be accurately converted to gray scale. We believe that this is critical to the variable printing industry to bring the same kind of reliability and security to color printing that black-and-white digital printers have enjoyed for more than two decades.

Pick the Right Vendors

Once you have determined the kind of applications and print hardware that will meet your needs, be sure to select vendors who support a variety of data streams. You don't want to lock yourself into any proprietary tools, but you do want to be sure that the applications you build to print on one device are easily transportable to other devices. This gives you the flexibility of choosing the hardware and software best suited to your environment at the most attractive prices—another advantage of AFP.

Chris Reid is the commercial print solutions manager for IBM Printing Systems. He is responsible for worldwide output solutions customized for the needs of today's printers. Reid was IT manager of the Boulder Infoprint Center. During his tenure, he gained more than 10 years of experience working with customers and their applications in the direct mail, publishing and service bureau markets.