IAPHC

Automation is for Automatons!

We (and qui, there is fewer of "us" in the appellation "we" at IAPHC's Head Office :) are madly scrambling to get International Gallery awards imprinted and shipped to eager winners around the globe, anxious to share the good news with their clients.

After all, what better way to say as the year end holidays approach, "hey thanks for your business favoured client" than to present said client with a highly personalized duplicate International Gallery award that will ensure the name of your prepress/press/or postpress purveying firm is proudly displayed on the wall of key client's foyer, to be duly noted by all of key clients customers too?

But, in the nature of things, each individual award needs extra scrutiny.  Does this firm prefer LTD. or Limited?  How do you insert the umlaut accent sign in this database program so the word is presented correctly?  Is that art gallery in Ontario properly known as MetaGallery, or meta gallery, or metaGALLERY or...

It's the Teldon Mission to actually Give a Damn!

Sometimes, automation despite having all the indicia of the Holy Grail, is still not as precise as human intervention.  Perhaps our friends at Teldon Print Media in Vancouver put it best in their excellent video -- people at Teldon actually give a damn about their client's projects and some times that means having a second look.

By the by, the Teldon Video is posted to my Facebook page, you could look it up!  And to my friends Aimee Brown and Doug Maxwell at Teldon, your awards are in the shipping queue which is sometimes called "The Loopy Leprechaun Lawyer's Logjam" of getting it right the first time, cause we give a damn, durn it!

And in case our friends Amit Save with Magna Graphics Limited in Mumbai, India or Ray Leveque with Printcrafters Inc. in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada or Dawn Luft with McDowell Label and Screen Printing Co. in Plano, Texas are reading this, your awards are queuing up too!

What a Dumb Press!  and how smart is that!

Our friend Bill Lamparter of PrintCom Consulting Group in Charlotte NC, (the fellow we wrote about a few days ago on this Blog when he passed along the news that our rambling musings about print in this millennium garnered top speaker evaluation at the Executive Outlook confab a day prior to Print 09) well Bill wrote something, now more than a decade ago, that still resonates in our noggin.  Evaluating the KBA Karat 74 digital printing press, Bill famously wrote--"It is essentially a DUMB press, there is no room for operator intervention." emphasis supplied.

Bill heard us tell our Executive Outlook conference attendees that to our mind JDF (Job Definition Format) ought to be known by printers far and wide as JUST DARN FRUSTRATING.  JDF is a great tool, and as time goes by, it will be a silent partner in the way prepress/press/postpress machines talk to each other and with a minimal amount of human intervention; as it is quite clear that the more hands that touch a given print project, the more the bottom line of profitability on that job shrinks.

JDF is good and it ought to be invisible.  A given.  Expected.  As omni-present as the operating system on the computer you are reading this rant upon and never give it a second thought.  It's just there.

So we were intrigued to read this item in the CIP4 PRESS: JDF Bulletin: November 2009 e-newsletter:

"Printing Industries of America recently conducted a survey of "Who is using JDF" for CIP4. Most notable among the results was the number of printers expecting to implement automation this year or next. JDF automation (of various depths) was previously estimated by printers to be about 25%, with the other 75% reluctant to invest in any new technology unless business survival depended on it. With automation becoming a priority for many due to the economy, this PIA survey indicates that JDF automation is on the rise. While it also indicates an increased awareness of JDF than what we've seen in the past, there's still much more to do on the education front. Good news ... Printing Industries of America has agreed to work with CIP4 on a 2010 edition of the survey." For results (Powerpoint presentation)

All printers need some measure of automation, and someday the job scheduling board, updated by hand perhaps many times a day will be passe, although its wondrous virtue of being an 'at-a-glance' status report will lamentably not be the same on a PDA tethered to your belt.

What amazes us, is that so few in the global print and graphics industry are talking about 'cloud computing' solutions to the pressing need to implement MIS (misanthropes infuriating systemes?) and JDF and other automation applications in the print shoppe down the block. 

IBM and Adobe and Apple and Microsoft all are working feverishly to create cloud solutions across the pantheon of computing apps, but the automation offerings to printers are in the main: "you need to buy a full blown MIS operating system and hire a geek to run it even though you won't have a clue what the propeller head wise man is talking about."

Whassup wid dat?  Makes no sense man!

In truth most printers know the need to automate is NOW, but it's just so darn frustrating to figure out HOW?

Cheers,