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Increased Profit Margin with JDF
Those who order printed matter are usually interested in three primary things: fast deliveries, low prices, and high quality. The printing houses compete on these premises and therefore experience rather low profit margins. One way to raise these margins can be to implement JDF into your production flow.
Correctly used, JDF can reduce production times, increase print quality, and reduce costs for the printing house. This results in faster deliveries, higher quality products, and the possibility to further press prices. Consequently, everyone wins with a well-developed and properly functioning JDF flow.
The secret behind the above-mentioned feat is the platform independent automation that JDF offers. It is the automation that makes it possible to realize all the benefits so the higher the level of automation, the greater the profit.
Less Work, Fewer Mistakes
If we imagine that a printing house has a fully developed JDF flow, nothing more is needed than feeding information about a job into the management system. The information is then sent further with JDF’s help. Thus, order information doesn’t need to be re-entered over and over in every new link of the production chain. The need to manually fill in work orders is eliminated and with it much of the administrative need is also reduced. Through this automation the number of sources of potential errors affecting the information’s integrity is also reduced.
Shorter Times, Larger Profits
The JDF file can also contain settings parameters for the production equipment, which considerably reduces the time needed to set machines and since the information moves between the equipment as soon as it is done with a particular section, even larger time savings can be achieved. The settings parameters help improve conditions for achieving desirable results, even with less qualified operators, which saves time and results in less waste paper.
More Control, Smoother Running Production
JDF also offers the possibility to receive status reports from the production line, which makes it possible to perform more exact after-calculations and these can be the foundation for more reality-based production planning. Status reports also make it possible to supervise the production in real time, find bottlenecks in the production process, and have good control over material consumption.
All in all, JDF provides benefits that both the customer and the printing house strive for. The printing house becomes more flexible and has better possibilities to direct a job. In this way, fast deliveries, increased quality, and a possibility to further press prices are guaranteed. However, one should add that the above description is a bit of a vision for the future, but it is completely possible. The development of JDF is progressing but all production equipment and software are still not fully compatible with each other. Furthermore, it is expensive to buy the equipment all at once. Training efforts and campaigns to help people get used to the technique are also needed but these can be time-consuming and costly. It can therefore be appropriate to take things one step at a time and let development catch up, while at the same time starting small with acclimation and the use of JDF with, for example, prepress. One can then later expand the system until the entire printing house is part of the digital flow.
For more information about JDF, please visit www.cip4.org.
