Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and we’re back with Joanne David who is President and CEO of Ultimate Technographics. We’ve been talking about imposition and automating imposition. But really a job’s not finished until it’s finished is what the finishing vendors like to say. How do you guys work with the finishing vendors in terms of imposition?

Joanne David: In fact, imposition is about finishing. The way we display pages on paper, it’s about how we’re going to finish the job. Is it a book, a booklet, et cetera? So it’s a natural extension of what we do to automate finishing. The manufacturers have done a lot to automate and modernize their equipment, but we still need to set up the machine manually. So Ultimate Bindery is the software we introduced in 2008 at Drupa in order to—and we worked with the manufacturers to automate their equipment. We look at the incoming job, its impose, and just before being printed we generate a job ticket for the finishing device to be set automatically. That can be for an in-line process.

Cary Sherburne: Does that use JDF?

Joanne David: Yes, it is based on JDF and JMF standards, so all the communication and the job ticketing is done based on that standard. What the value is by collaborating with the finishing partners is that we understand not only the compatibilities of the machine, but also some of the constraints. And we can verify the job, if the job is billed properly, to be finished on the device. If not, then we can stop before being printed. If we do that, then there’s an extra advantage and it means we have less waste after printing.

Cary Sherburne: In a lot of shops, because of the level of automation we’ve been able to achieve, and because of the short runs and so on, sometimes they’ll have the operator that’s running the press, a digital press, also running the finishing. Obviously its in-line but even if it’s near-line, so that allows them to save time by not having to manually set up the finishing device and reduce error.

Joanne David: Absolutely, yes. This is the first advantage we see. The automation removed the need to do manual set up, which also means that the operator can do more important tasks. But it also have an extra layer of quality control, because now we can verify the job before printing and finishing. So no more waste with this solution.

Cary Sherburne: And waste in finishing is very expensive waste.

Joanne David: Very expensive, and if we care about our environment this is even more important.

Cary Sherburne: Well environment, time to market, customer satisfaction, all of that rolls in so great work. Thank you.

Joanne David: Yes, yes. Thank you very much.