As with so much in life, the reason why it’s spreading is down to time and money, and the potential to save both. Strictly speaking, we’re talking about workflow management and workflow automation, as any series of processes that results in something out of the end is a workflow. What you want is for the thing that you’re producing to be right first time, every time, with as little interruption and intervention along the way as possible.

For automation to work, there needs to be additional information and standardisation of the processes used,
which is something that has been slowly realised by suppliers to the industry.

“What people need is more automation,” says Gradual Software founder and chief executive Peter Camps. “And I believe metadata is important for that.”

Camps has spent much of his career developing pre-press workflow automation. Before founding Gradual, he launched Enfocus, another software firm, which developed pre-flight checking, and PDF file correction and quality assurance products. Making sure that incoming files are correct and don’t need additional manual processing is one of the pre-requisites of automation. “For automation to be successful, the quality of the content needs to be high,” says Camps. “Enfocus and other firms ensured that quality of content. The prerequisite for automation is quality control – colour and pre-flight. These were all tasks that were previously done manually and you probably still need more automation there.”

Accuracy of information
Once your content is up to specification, and assured, then you need to look at the next level. The word ‘assurance’ is important in all this. Not only do you need things to be right, you need a method to prove things are right, which is where metadata comes in. Metadata is information about a particular file that travels along with it, either embedded into the file or separately as another file. The important thing is that metadata makes explicit information such as where a file has come from, what has been done to it, what needs to be done to it, and by when, among other things.

“There’s no automation without metadata,” says Camps, and it was this belief that led to founding of Gradual. Camps and Gradual aren’t the only one in the market to get behind t metadata – the job definition format (JDF), that much touted tool for print production automation is also a form of metadata, but it is one that is very specifically aimed at print production. JDF has been around for a while and is being adopted as a way to communicate and control print production processes, but it isn’t the only metadata format around that is relevant to the print industry.

Print is at the output stage of the communication process. By the time a job has got to print, lots has already happened further up the chain to determine what the message is and how best to communicate it to the target audience. Increasingly in the spheres of marketing and publication, where the biggest volumes of print are generated, automation and the adoption of software is also becoming common. Publishers and marketers are under pressure to deliver their messages in more and more different ways, be that print, email, online and text message or a combination of any of those four often without any additional budget to deliver to many media rather than just one.

These print clients are themselves adopting automation to manage the complicated methods of getting their message across and therefore want printers that have got systems in place to be able to receive and process jobs automatically.

Increasingly, there are marketing resource management systems (MRM) and a blizzard of other three-letter acronyms that describe similar things that digitise and automate what were previously manual processes. And just like print has developed JDF as the metadata format to facilitate communi­cation between processes and machines, there are metadata formats springing up to help manage and automate the processes of creating content and getting it into production.

The XMP era
Adobe’s Extensible Metadata platform (XMP) is the file format with the most significance in these markets. Adobe describes it as “taking away the heavy lifting of metadata integration”. 

“XMP is the key for everyone,” says Turning Point Innovation (TPI) marketing director Steve Emerson. “The beauty of XMP is that it’s in every Adobe application and once embedded, the data can’t be stripped out. It doesn’t seem to have been picked up by anyone yet, but it’s early doors, and as a betting man, I’d say my bet is on it being the next big thing.”

In some ways, the rise of XMP can compared to the rise of PostScript, Adobe’s page description language. Twenty odd years ago, PostScript paved the way for desktop publishing and resulted in a revolution in the way jobs were designed and typeset prior to print. The DTP revolution took typesetting from an outsourced skilled service to something designers could do themselves on low-cost desktop computers.

What XMP and metadata enables is for a lot of the work that is currently manually designed, whether it’s printed pages, web pages or emails, to move from desktop design to automated assembly on a server.

That sort of application in which databases of images and text are combined on the fly and then output using the appropriate templates to one or many media depending on the parameters set by the publisher or marketer are starting to be adopted, but even where designers are working manually XMP metadata has its place in helping with the automation downstream in pre-press. But for that to work those pre-press applications need to be XMP-aware. TPI’s core products, including Xinet image workflow and asset management, Dalim pre-press workflow and GMG proofing are all already XMP aware.

Automation on the up
Gradual’s PowerSwitch is the key for unlocking XMP and other metadata formats for products that may not themselves be XMP-aware. That ability to enable automation where it was previously too difficult or expensive was one of Camps’ goals for Gradual. While PowerSwitch has the ability to enable XMP workflows, it is only the backbone to support the applications that actually do the work. Gradual has launched an initiative called Crossroads to rally together firms who produce those applications. Within Crossroads are firms such as Axaio whose products add extra information in XMP to files at the creation stage to enable automated processes downstream as well as others whose products them use the Switch products to help them interpret and carry out those instructions automatically.

Axaio’s MadeToPrint is only one of the new generation of products that can be used to add XMP instructions within Adobe’s Creative Suite to files that enable subsequent automated processing.

TPI has recently started to distribute a product called Specle Create, which embeds publication specifications such as crop, bleed, ICC profile and delivery instructions in the file.

While it has been possible in the past to automate the processing of pre-press files so they have the correct specifi­cations, that has relied on rigid file naming conventions or custom scripting the workflow. The problem with scripting is that it requires in-house expertise or a third party. Using metadata-driven workflows reduces the need for those specialist skills while extending the scope for automation.

Emerson sums up the need for this next wave of automation simply: “All these systems help to get the printer a clean PDF that doesn’t touch the sides. For many printers and customers the mantra is if you want it printed for that price, then you don’t want it to touch the sides.”

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AUTOMATION BEYOND PRE-PRESS
Objective Advantage is a software firm with roots outside print that
has a different take on the market than equipment and MIS suppliers. Its Symbio product picks up the automation baton from where the pre-press systems above sign off with a clean PDF file and considers manufacturing the
job and assembling all the components as one process rather than distinguishing between pre-press, printing and post-press.

Chief executive Gareth O’Brien believes print production has only taken baby steps toward automation and is at the stage of computer-assisted manufacturing rather than fully automated production, with a lot of processes still relying on someone’s expertise and judgement to carry on.

“We take a non-print approach,” says O’Brien. “70-80% of typical printshop products are made up of just 20 different job types. An A5 full-bleed postcard is an A5 full-bleed postcard. In most printers it’s the same type of basic types of jobs day in and day out. Our approach differs from the ‘print’ way of doing things is that we create a production method ahead of time.”

Having those pre-defined production templates means that the software can hook up with a web-to-print system with little need for operator intervention.

O’Brien claims that the first time a job is handled is when the digital press operator checks the right paper is loaded before releasing the print queue. From then on the job can also follow pre-determined processes through post-press, and with the right kit that can be totally hands-off too.