I spoke recently at a user group meeting composed largely of commercial printers when the topic of the 'Cloud' came up. I was a bit surprised to hear a very high level of suspicion. I asked the audience: "Who is excited about the opportunities presented by the Cloud?" Two hands went up. "Who’s not?" About half the audience raised their hands. Multiple questions were put forward about data security, possible integration issues, and overall viability. The bad vibes were much stronger than I anticipated.
We hear a lot about workflow automation, but today I’m going to discuss some tools designed to help your operators do their jobs quicker and more efficiently. I’m looking at EFI’s Fiery Graphic Arts Package, Premium Edition (GAPPE).
The next time you feel that your jobs are too complex to automate, or that your job mix is too broad to automate, think again. Perhaps you don’t have sufficient volume for it to make sense, but you certainly don’t need to have 1,000 jobs a day to justify it. And if Standard Register can make this work in their high-complexity, high-variety, high-volume world then perhaps something like this could work in yours.
While continuous digital presses are a long way from the (close to) mile-a-minute of paper of the fastest offset web presses, they are closing in on the 1,000 feet-per-minute mark. This is creating an issue for the postpress equipment that accompanies the press. Much of the current crop of post-press unwinders, cutter, sheeters, and web perforation systems top out at around 600 feet-per-minute.
After 10 years (more, or less) of JDF, where does its adoption stand in the bindery? Well, not so large. There were lots of challenges in getting binders, stitchers, cutters, folders and more to operate seamlessly from downloaded instructions.
Many digital folks don’t realize the extent of publication personalization that occurred in postpress back in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, full-color digital printing presents new opportunities. In an ideal world, you simply print the entire magazine digitally, but here’s no economic scenario in which the all-digital magazine is profitable.
Greetings from South America! I am spending my summer working for Heidelberg in its lead market, São Paulo, Brazil. Similar to my time with Heidelberg in Germany, I am working within the company’s integrated workflow system, called Prinect.
The “cloud”—once the purview of IT geeks and software developers—has gotten personal. For several years, there’s been a movement to transition software from the desktop or local server to the cloud. One example is Web-to-print software, typically offered as Saas (software-as-a-service).
Nearly a quarter of the firms surveyed that subscribe to software through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model subscribe to Web-to-Print software. The benefits of using SaaS include a universally accessible Web-based interface, reduced start-up costs, and decreased risks in developing and launching new services.
Many print service providers have heard the term “cloud computing.” The availability and affordability of such computing power, coupled with increasingly capable Web development technology, has led to the rapid development of software that is accessed through a Web browser.
