Workflow is becoming a very big word for the printing industry in that it is now covering such a wide area of services. Workflow has been around for years and for most people it probably still means what it started out as, namely the automation of the prepress activities. We started to see workflow coming to the fore in the 1990s when different elements of software came together to allow a cohesive automated process to take place. The real start of prepress workflow came with the first automated imposition system that if I remember correctly came from Ultimate. Workflow started by having a hot folder in which pages from a page creation package such as Quark Xpress would be dropped into and the imposition package would then take these pages and makes them into imposed sections. With the development of the CIP3 structure for sending data to the press control system to set up ink keys, workflow developed with the imposition package outputting both the imposed files for output to film or plate, plus the settings for the press ink keys.

At this time a number of the prepress suppliers offered their own full workflows. The first of these were highly proprietary in the languages they used. There were really two approaches. The text based suppliers worked their solutions around PostScript, whereas the color suppliers like Scitex with their Brisque system had image based solutions using what was known as CT (color images) and line work (text and line images converted to a line work image). At this time these systems did not link up to printers MIS systems and never went beyond ink key press set up.

We had a number of suppliers. All the suppliers of imagesetters and CtP devices would have workflow to drive their devices. These predominantly were PostScript based. We also had a few specialized workflow only suppliers. The press manufacturers also had workflow but in most cases these started with receipt of CIP3 ink key setting data and then were concentrated on the operation of the press. Only Heidelberg offered a prepress workflow to link with their press workflow.