CIP4 Announces 2010 CIPPI Award Winners for JDF Implementation
MEMPHIS, TN—Nov. 8, 2010—The International Cooperation for the Integration of the Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4) organization announced the 2010 winners of the Jürgen Schönhut Memorial CIP4 International Print Production Innovation (CIPPI) Awards at a luncheon event during Printing Industries of America’s Converge Conference. The CIPPI awards are given annually to the printer, publisher or prepress service that submits the most compelling case study in three topical categories and four regions. The winners are:
• Best cost/benefit realization and improvement in efficiency as a result of process automation implementation
First Place — Vögeli AG Druckzentrum of Langnau, Switzerland
Second Place — Times Printers Pte Ltd. of Singapore
• Biggest improvement in quality production & customer responsiveness as a result of process automation
First Place — Associates International, Inc. of Wilmington, DE
Second Place — Canon Print Square, Inc. of Shinagawa, Japan
• Most innovative use of process automation technology in an implementation
Ten Brink/Hooiberg Haasbeek of Meppel, The Netherlands
• Best Digital Printing Process Automation
Canon Print Square, Inc. of Shinagawa, Japan
• Best Process Automation Implementation — Asia/Pacific
Times Printers Pte Ltd., of Singapore
• Best Process Automation Implementation — Europe
Ten Brink/Hooiberg Haasbeek of Meppel, The Netherlands
• Best Process Automation Implementation — North America
JP Graphics, Inc. of Appleton, WI
Any printer, prepress service or publisher may apply for the CIPPI awards. Awards are determined by a Review Panel of judges without affiliation to any vendor, printer, prepress service or publisher. The four Review Panel judges were: Patrick Cahuet of 1Prime|Concept (France); Stephan Jaeggi of PrePress-Consulting (Switzerland; Tetsuo Kimura of PrinTechno, Inc. (Japan); and John Leininger of Clemson University (USA).
Two of the winners, Associates International and Canon Print Square, are digital printers that have combined digital printing, Web-to-print and JDF-enabled automation to produce a dramatic effect.
“Both Canon Print Square and Associates International have given us examples of what the printer of the future will look like,” said CIPPI Award Judge Patrick Cahuet. “Associates stated that their goal was ‘lights out production,’ and while both companies still maintain staff, their productivity and labor savings clearly demonstrate that there is a way to increase efficiency and profitability during difficult economic times.”
The winners with conventional printing operations also demonstrated focus on the bottom line.
“One of the things that I liked about the Vögeli case study was its ‘no nonsense’ approach to calculating ROI,” said CIP4 Executive Director Jim Harvey. “In certain applications it is hard to distinguish whether contributions to the bottom line came from new equipment purchases or the implementation of JDF-enabled automation. The folks at Vögeli were very clear to make that distinction and produced an ROI calculation that other printers can learn from.”
The 2010 CIPPI award-winning case studies may be downloaded from: www.cip4.org/cippi/ where you can also get more information on the CIPPI awards program. (Summaries of each winning case study can be found in the section below.)
About CIP4
CIP4 brings together vendors, consultants, and end-users in the print communications, graphic arts industry, and associated sectors, covering a variety of equipment, software, peripherals, and processes. Members participate in focused working groups to define the Job Definition Format (JDF), PrintTalk, and other standards relevant to process automation; to study user requirements; to test product interoperability; and to develop a range of JDF software development tools. Information on CIP4, including membership details, is available from the organization’s website: www.cip4.org. Or contact: Stefan Daun, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, +49 6151 155 575, secretariat@cip4.org. All content and ideas submitted to the CIP4 user groups and intellectual property rights subsisting therein shall become the exclusive property of CIP4.
About JDF
The Job Definition Format (JDF) is the industry specification designed to facilitate process automation and the integration of different applications and systems in and around the graphic arts industry. JDF also enables the integration of business management and job planning applications into the production workflow. JDF is based on the W3C’s Extensible Markup Language (XML), ensuring maximum interoperability between different platforms and ready interaction with Internet systems. More information is available at http://www.cip4.org/.
About the CIPPI Award Program
The CIPPI award is named after the late Jürgen Schönhut of the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt Germany. Mr. Schönhut was a founding member of CIP4 whose contribution was instrumental in creating both CIP4, and its predecessor, the CIP3 Consortium. (For more information on Jürgen Schönhut: http://www.cip4.org/cippi/juergen_schoenhut.html).
Summaries of 2010 CIPPI Award-winning Case Studies
Vögeli AG Druckzentrum, Langnau, Switzerland
Family-owned fourth generation printer
• Revenue of 9.5 million Swiss Francs
• 50 employees
• 40% of customers are Swiss advertising agencies, the rest are customers from the pharmaceutical, medical, watch, jewelry and food industries
• Products include brochures, annual reports, postcards, catalogs and invitations.
Objectives of Implementation
• Reduce error risk related to incorrect or missing information
• Time savings for investigating, re-checking and/or re-submitting already-provided data
• Improve efficiency over the entire workflow
• Automation of processes to offer best prices to customers at secured quality standards
• Improve customer service and responsiveness
• Enhance transparency and flexibility in our administration (MIS)
Implementation
• Implemented bi-directional JDF/JMF workflow
• Automated JDF/JMF workflow that includes HIFLEX (MIS), Kodak (Prinergy and InSite), as well as Heidelberg (Pressroom Manager)
Results
• Productivity has more than doubled since 2004 due to new presses and automation
• Workflow would have required three additional employees without JDF
• Eliminated production meetings (Savings of SFr. 13,500 per year)
• Elimination of SFr. 94,500 per year production waste of with JDF/PPF technology used today
• The net present value (NPV) of our project is SFr. 2,517,247
• Based on a five-year period, Return on Investment is 657.3%
• Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is 252.0%
Times Printers Pte Ltd., Singapore
Web offset printing company
• Established in 1968
• 350 employees
• Prints news, magazines and textbooks
• 7 Goss web presses, Komori, manroland, Mitsubishi and Heidelberg sheetfeed presses and Muller Martini postpress equipment
Objectives of Implementation
• Decrease non-productive time throughout all areas of the business, so production capacity is optimized, achieving higher throughput with the same amount of manpower and machinery
• Integrate sales forecasting, production control and inventory control so that real time, enterprise-wide resource planning can be carried out effectively. Automate the forecasting and planning of material and production capacity to optimally fulfill the demands of the sales orders
• Closing of financial accounts at a date closer to the end of the month, as a result of faster and timely costing
• Higher efficiency in scheduling and capacity planning
• More accurate forecasting from the Sales Department
• Ad hoc sales campaigns to sell free capacity
• Reduction in inventory and subsequent write-offs in stock depreciation
Implementation
• Collected five responses to an ERP system RFQ
• Selected Heidelberg Prinect/Prinance ERP
• Conducted information analysis of plant which resulted in establishing new departments
• Integrated with J.D Edwards OneWorld financial system
• Trained 250 staff members on new systems, terminals and procedures
• Phased in department-by-department
Results
• Reorganization of estimating, planning and scheduling departments, resulting in more efficient flow of information and response to customers
• Automatic impositioning at planning stage
• Automatic calculation of OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) without having a clerk to collate and produce the reports
• Basic Customer Relationship Management module to produce marketing reports in addition to the automated sales reports (which were previously compiled manually)
• Integrated material management for paper, from ordering and booking of incoming paper to issuing of material to production
• Real time and integrated scheduling. Automatic flow of information from planning into scheduling without intermediate steps and proprietary systems such as MS Excel
• Integration of Kodak Insite, a web-to-print solution into Heidelberg Prepress Manager
• Automated job costing and capturing of total cost of sales for monthly financial performance reporting
• The net present value (NPV) of our project is € 1,194,792
• Based on a five-year period, the Return on Investment is 224.4%
Associates International, Wilmington, DE
On-demand and conventional printing, and web-based document management
• Established in 1973
• 51+ employees
• $11m revenues in 2009
• Previous CIPPI Award Winner
• New Implementation involving Xerox, Avanti and Creo Servers (Kodak)
Objectives of Implementation
• For jobs worth less than $400, costing was manually entered for hundreds of jobs per day
• Invoicing was delayed 7-10 days
• Experienced inventory shortages due to delay in entries or missed entries
• Inability to analyze usage of 3 iGen presses
Implementation
• The Creo/Avanti/Xerox integration transmits all job numbers, labor, paper costs and click charges back to the Avanti MIS automatically.
• Jobs are created in Avanti and exported directly to Manifest Automation from Xerox (MAX), enabling a job to go through the prepress stage without operator-intervention, as well as allowing Avanti the ability to gang or batch-run “like” pieces from traditional digital workflow.
• This has enabled better analytics and ability to determine workflow usage.
• Paper management issues have been resolved due to the automated management of the stocks.
• Invoicing is now completed in less than 24 hours for all digital jobs.
Results
• $21,000 to $30,000 saved based on the fact that the three vendors had already worked together.
• “Lights out Automation” — 19 hours of shift labor per day was reduced to 9 hours per day for a labor/cost savings of $98,147.
• Billing is now done within 24 hours and the accounting department labor was reduced by 27.25% for a savings of $48,848.
• Automated job costing eliminates 2 hours per day for additional savings of $13,000 per year
• Total annual cost savings of $227,370 with an ROI of $188,489 and payback period of 2.47 months.
• Reduced staff by a total of 2 employees and eliminated the need for one digital print shift.
• Fixed and variable costs have been reduced by 21% with these implemented integrations.
Canon Print Square Inc., Shinagawa, Japan
Print-on-demand leaflets, catalogs and manuals
• Created in 2009
• 69 employees
• Revenue of ¥ 800 million in 2009
• Introduced Photopresso photobook printing service in July 2010, part of the Canon iMAGE Gateway, an online photo resource and service for owners of Canon cameras
Objectives
• Cut down job submission time
• Cut down production time
• Ability to undercut competitors’ prices
Details
• B6 sized perfect bound books with inserts, cover, ranging from 40 to 204 pages
• Most orders are for one book only
• Canon presses and POD job submission with Horizon and Duplo finishing
• Previously required 71/2 hours to manufacture 100 photobooks.
• Quality inspection is required
• Inability to analyze usage of 3 iGen presses
Implementation
• Project started in December 2009, with service starting on July 23, 2010
• Implemented “3 button” user interface … all jobs are started with just three operator steps
• Uses barcodes on print jobs to relay job setup instructions to postpress consoles
• Includes job simplification steps like adding color labels to paper trays to avoid miss-loading of paper.
Results
• After installing JDF system to do job submission, printing, creasing and perfect binding, it takes about 41/2 to complete a batch of 100 books (vs. 71/2 hours)
• Job submission to Horizon and Duplo devices cut from 2 hours for 100 jobs to 30 minutes
• Almost 100% of books go directly from job submission to shipping
• Operators don’t need to know job specifications; operators can concentrate on quality inspection at the final stage of manufacturing to check printing and finishing quality
Ten Brink/Hooiberg Haasbeek, Meppel, The Netherlands
Conventional printing, digital print and automation solutions of books and magazines for the scientific, educational and general publishing market and the documentation market and manuals
• 270 employees
• 15,000 tons of paper used (sheet fed offset only)
• Approx. 250,000 plates used per year
• 5 production shifts
• Heidelberg and KBA presses and finishing equipment from Muller Martini, MBO, Wholenberg, Sitma, Perfecta, Bell & Howell, and Palamides with Xgram MIS from Systeemhuis Compri
Objectives
• Decrease in errors, printing the wrong jobs, using the wrong plates. (Goal was to decrease job errors by at least 50%)
• Process improvement using accurate data during all stages of the production process
• Increase of production output by making full use of the possibilities of the KBA ‘on-the-fly’ Rapida 106-4 SW2 presses. (Goal was improving output by at least 25%)
• Decrease in order management costs. (Goal was to decrease by at least 4-5%)
• Faster invoicing after delivery of the jobs, (Goal was an average of invoicing 2-3 days after delivery – vs. 5-10 days previously)
Details
• As a result of mergers, the operations of four companies were merged into the Ten Brink plant as part of the implementation
• The company decided to re-install one of two MIS systems they already owned in order to save time and money. (Xgram MIS)
• To address more short-run jobs, new presses were installed with “flying job change” capabilities, bringing press downtime to near zero.
Implementation
• Project started in October 2009, and was completed by January 28, 2010
• Implementation team included three Ten Brink managers, as well as project managers and experts from Systeemhuis Compri, KBA and Kodak
• Implementation began with offline testing, followed by online testing and then development of manuals and training before system went live
• Solution included adding a datamatrix code to plates that could be scanned with KBA Plate Ident technology
Results
• Output increased from 2750 sheets per hour to 5500-7000 sheets per hour
• Improved customer service due to the fact that order management is able to answer customers’ order status questions directly from Xgram based on the direct JMF input of Prinergy and KBA Logotronic
• Increased output of the KBA Rapida 106 presses by 50% and more, with 28% achieved by JDF/JMF integration
• Errors generated by using the wrong plates for the wrong jobs were decreased to 0%
• Order management costs were cut by >5%
• Average number of days between delivery and invoicing became 2½ days
• Achieved a Net Present Value of € 4,415,123 and an ROI of 4014% on a five-year basis
JP Graphics, Inc., Appleton, WI
Commercial Printer
• Founded in 1969
• 25 employees
• $4.1 million in sales
• The company grew aggressively, but was hampered by isolated workflow steps and manual communications between departments
Objectives
• Find an alternative to calculating estimates by hand
• Integrate all Departments and eliminate the re-entering of data 5-7 times
• Improve data accuracy
• Improve response time to customer
• Establish automated JDF link to Prepress
• Establish automated JMF link back to MISDetails
• Expand sales territory without additional sales reps
• Offer a wide array of printed products online with accurate estimation (no price listing)
• Develop a solution for estimating the massive number of jobs from brokers
• Integrate web-to-print with MIS
• Lower ordering costs, making smaller online orders viable (current admin costs are higher than order)
“The biggest draw for going online was the number of estimates that brokers would request, and the low percentage of these estimates that would actually turn into jobs. The traditional method of estimating wastes too much time, meaning there was minimal or no benefit in profit.”
Implementation
• Implemented HIFLEX MIS and Webshop Web2Print
• Created separate store fronts for existing customers, brokers and an open customer store front for new customers searching for printing services
• JDF/JMF connection to Kodak Prinergy allows for automatic job creation, processing and imposition.
Results
• Response time to the customer has improved with faster estimates and quicker turnaround in prepress
• Automatic imposition generation and automated JDF transfer of this data along with other JDF specifications to Prinergy drastically cuts prepress time
• Integration of Estimation, Quotation, Order Entry, Job Tracking, Customer Relationship Management, Material Management, Prepress, Scheduling, Shipping, and Billing
• No daily production meeting has resulted in time savings for at least 8 people a day
• Billing is much more accurate because of the costing data input into HIFLEX for every piece of equipment as well as materials
• Increase in sales territory due to increased online presence in 3 different forms
• A solution for estimating the massive number of jobs from brokers, saving thousands of dollars
• Increased interest in company’s online presence now that they are deliver custom portals for larger clients
• Achieved an annual cost savings of $385,937
• Expected gross income from new business opportunities: $3,200,000