Martin Bailey (MB): Apart from the extra communication with MIS, JDF covers a lot more processes than PDF. It will provide real end user benefits. By facilitating better communication with the MIS and production, and by offering a more structured way to contain data, JDF will enable the transfer of data beyond the MIS into other areas such as the warehouse and accounts. This is a print buyer and customer benefit. These are ways in which you can become more of a customer service provider.

On 16 June a hand-picked selection of vendors and printers look part in a round table discussion to debate the state of JDF today, where it's going tomorrow and what it means for the industry. They covered the benefits, the pitfalls and pricked the bubbles of hype and myth surrounding the topic.

Frank Romano (FR), who chaired the event, kicked proceedings off by discussing the evolution of JDF.

FR: JDF began as an acronym, then became an adjective, and is evolving into a noun. From being a good idea it has become almost a religious movement. There is a misconception that going out and buying JDF can solve all the problems of the printing industry.

PrintWeek: What are the benefits to the printer?

Simon Hunt (SH): We use Heidelberg presses and Creo pre-press and a Prism MIS. I want accurate shop-floor data capture into Prism MIS. Operator intervention didn't work. We are lacking an interface between presses and pre-press to bring all this data into our existing and very stable MIS environment. CIP4 gives me the opportunity to do that. What we want is an accurate actual-to-estimate comparison. Prism and Heidelberg are working together to achieve this. It is about to be implemented.

Mark Anderson (MA): JDF has been the enabler. We have working system connections with about 12 MIS vendors and we would never have done that if it were proprietary. JDF enables us to build the interface once and implement it with 12 users.

And the customer?

Nicholas Green (NG): Are there any benefits to the customers?

David Jones (DJ): JDF is merely a tool. The underlying problem is process automation. Every time you touch the job you spend money, so every time you eliminate one of these processes you save money. It is not a panacea but a mechanism for standardising the process across a large number of people to automate their co-operation.

John Cunningham (JCU): Present discussion is high end. There is a huge advantage for the customer. What we need to look at in conjunction with the benefits of JDF is where is the industry on the whole moving, in the way they communicate, in the publications they are creating, the types of material and the way they print that information. Look also at the technology coming out that supports that. Increasing collaboration requires improved communication to ensure that the job is reliably printed. Problems and errors occur between the concept of the creation and the final product. Communications between client and printer would be facilitated by JDF.

Martin Bailey (MB): Apart from the extra communication with MIS, JDF covers a lot more processes than PDF. It will provide real end user benefits. By facilitating better communication with the MIS and production, and by offering a more structured way to contain data, JDF will enable the transfer of data beyond the MIS into other areas such as the warehouse and accounts. This is a print buyer and customer benefit. These are ways in which you can become more of a customer service provider.

MA: Telling the customer you are going to implement JDF won't mean very much to them in most cases. It needs to be translated into real business terms. It is necessary to discuss solutions rather than the technology itself, which is just a tool. It is a mistake to focus on the technology because it does not mean anything to the customer.

DJ: We have asked why you would adopt JDF. Why wouldn't you adopt a standard?

FR: What is the alternative to JDF? Chaos.

MB: Whenever you are upgrading software or replacing equipment or adding new capacity, you should be considering interaction with other systems and members of the industry. I believe the answer here is to look at JDF because it happens to give you the best return on your investment.

Does JDF hang on the coat tails of MIS?

John Charnock (JCH): JDF hangs on the coat tails of the benefit of MIS. The benefits we are discussing are the results of MIS, not JDF.

MB: With JDF it is easier for MIS vendors to put a decent system together. JDF is just a way of sending a well-structured bag of data. It allows products to do more because they have more and better structured data to work with. With more data available, smarter systems can be written.

DS: We benefit as an MIS manufacturer. Many MIS manufacturers have their own internal systems. When they come to link to the pre-press they would not have to build the interface from scratch every time.

Are there alternatives to JDF?

JCH: What is the benefit of driving JDF when it could be forced by other factors in the supply chain?

MB: CIP4 decided to talk to organisations with existing specifications, which do not directly overlap with JDF in order to make sure that those standards can interact.

JCH: Within the supply chain there are already a number of XML schemas that are different.

DJ: The standard is XML, and since different parts of the supply chain have different problems, no one standard is going to cover everything.

JCH: What is CIP4 doing to implement their standards in those areas?

MB: Ensuring the right data is in the right places. We have made sure that if you are ordering your paper you can have the right information in the JDF in terms of how you specify web widths or thickness etc.

JCH: If a customer comes to us and says they want a specific type of paper and the information comes in as a JDF into our MIS, what happens if we then send it to our paper supplier and they cannot read it?

DS: The JDF file defines your production, not your commercial or purchase orders. It is a language that is used by your industry and centres around how you are going to flow that job through the factory. It is quite different from a purchase order.

MB: You still have to do a translation but you need the right data to begin with to make sure you fill in the purchase order accurately.

DS: While they are quite different standards, the symmetry and similarities between them are apparent now that they are both XML and using the same infrastructure and communications processes. Previously you had EDI for purchases and several internal proprietary links for production definitions. At least now we can develop one set of tools which takes the information out of the database, outputs it in predefined XML formats, and uses the same communication infrastructure.

FR: JDF lets the machines talk to one another. It is the lingua franca of the printing industry.

JCH: JDF is the language? I had always thought that JDF was the alphabet, the language was the breakdown of the words, and the paragraph or the sentence was the description of the job.

FR: None of the above. My definition of JDF would be the metadata about the job that flows with the job throughout the system, the metadata being the information about the job, not the job itself.

Where are we and where are we going?

FR: No printer has end to end JDF, but people who want to hype up JDF will lead you to believe that this is the case.

MB: We have not said this. It is often the case that as the information is filtered from us down to customers, vendors, manufacturers, it gets over-simplified and distorted.

DS: In reality we use MIS for finishing, pre-press, and press, with a bit of JDF along the way.

FR: When can we expect to see an end to end JDF profile?

MB: 2006.