Since the Industrial Revolution, the machines have been participating of the production process of consumer goods. The productivity gains allow improving the life quality, as well as the human being expectations. Today, we expect to receive modern and best products with lower prices.

Great investments are done by industry to allow producing too much products with lower costs. The result: equipment and production processes much more automated.

It has been a long time that our “Printing Arts” sector has becoming “Printing Industry”. As an industry, it is also subjected to the same type of pressure. New equipment, materials and processes have kept the quality stable, the productivity was increased and then, new types of products and services were created. 

However, when the printing industry is compared to others industries, it is possible to see that this industry has a low level of automation yet. For a printing that uses technology from several suppliers, it is little feasible to implement a production process 100% automated because the equipment and control systems do not “communicate” by the lack of a common language.

The JDF aim is the following: to create a common language that allows the communication among several equipment and theirs control systems. Thus, the automation can be done.

The term JDF stands for “Job Definition Format”, an opened standard, based on XML language that not only allows specifying a printing product with the whole details, but also managing the production from several steps until the product delivery to the customer. The JDF is created and kept by a joint of companies called CIP4.

The following chart shows the main elements that compose an automated production environment, based on JDF:

The management system is in the centre and its function is to manage the execution of each activity, defining the product and accompanying each one of the steps. Prepress, Press and PostPress are integrated through the information exchange that are generated in each area and complemented in the next steps.

The JDF implementations cases are little yet, but this technology is becoming mature quickly. Soon, we will receive implementation news and it will be possible to evaluate this automation impact in the companies result and in the services that they can offer.

It is important to know that JDF is not a product, but it is a technology that is integrated to a product.

Actually, if you do or consume printing products, JDF will be more present in the production of this type of product. From the company side, the main question will be the increase of the automation level in the industry and the benefit that it can brings in the increase of competitivity.

For further information about JDF, access: www.cip4.org.