April 4, 2003, Kennesaw, GA -- At VUE/POINT 2003 this week, Heidelberg presented Prinect, its innovative approach to Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) at its annual VUE/POINT breakfast. More than 150 industry leaders attended the event, which highlighted Heidelberg's Prinect offerings and new Prinect Printready Prepress system based entirely on JDF and PDF production. Prinect is not a single product but a number of products that that span the entire Heidelberg product spectrum ranging from prepress, press, postpress and digital solutions. Business systems solutions and integration are also part of the Prinect scope, which translates into a spectrum of Prinect products that serve the entire printing workflow. The Prinect umbrella of products all contribute to an integrated and open workflow by Heidelberg. Prinect is a network of workflow components that provide digital information for the entire print process. All data required for order planning, order processing, job tracking and product processing are exchanged throughout the entire Prinect system. Underlying Prinect are standard industry formats such as JDF, PDF and CIP3 PPF, because Interoperability between Heidelberg developed solutions and those of other vendors is very important, even those developed in-house by our own customers. The breakfast featured Heidelberg's Prinect Printready System, designed from the ground up to be completely based on JDF. The Prinect Printready System is Heidelberg's JDF based solution for Prepress or Preprint production, and as such, it will be an important part of the overall Prinect umbrella concept. Printready will handle within the Prinect overall framework all processes related to customer file submission, Normalizing PS to PDF, Preflighting, Spot Color Mapping and ICC based Color management, Trapping, Imposition, Proof and Hi-resolution rendering for plate and film production and archiving. Information will be also be generated for subsequent JDF or CIP3 PFF processing downstream. The Prinect Printready System is designed to provide for a highly scalable system architecture that is based on a modular building block approach. A common UI was developed that can be dynamically expanded to accommodate the addition of new system components or the optional extension of existing system modules. Besides underpinning the entire system with JDF, it was the design goal to efficiently separate job processing from set-up instructions used for actual job execution, and by so doing achieve a high level of workflow automation via automatic forwarding of one production task process to the next. Automation can be paused at logical stages in the workflow and built into the plan. The Prinect Printready System takes advantage of other workflow tools such as MetaDimension, SignaStation, Supertrap and the recently announced Supercolor for color management of PDFs. Heidelberg is committed to ensuring that the Prinect System architecture will be delivered at drupa 2004 and that all Prinect products will be JDF-enabled by that time. In Heidelberg's vision, all output devices ranging from proofers to press to stitchers to their associated Rips, consoles and stations will be JDF-enabled products including Signastation, MetaDimension and the Prinect Printready System are already JDF-enabled. Prinect will provide a logical and orchestrated control over this brave new world with a central job store and job ticket access management. At the VUE/POINT breakfast, Heidelberg gave a glimpse of the future -- a world where one job ticket resides and controls, as well as contains, information about the entire job. One Job Ticket that contains updated information about what must be done to the job and the factual and up to date information about what actually took place or is taking place with the job. The printing industry must reduce the number of steps in production and provide for greater automation, with less errors and up to date information that allows printers to realize profitable jobs. Prinect, Heidelberg's CIM, will do just that. All based on the industry standard JDF, as specified by the CIP4 organization.