Washington, DC (February 23, 2007) - The International Cooperation for the Integration of the Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4) organization today announced that the CIP4 has begun accepting applications for the 2007 Jürgen Schönhut Memorial CIP4 International Print Production Innovation (CIPPI) Awards. The CIPPI awards the only international awards program for printer production and efficiency. Each year the CIPPI award is given to a first and second place winner in each of three categories: * Most innovative use of process automation technology in an implementation. * Best cost/benefit realization as a result of process automation implementation. * Biggest improvement in efficiency and customer responsiveness as a result of process automation. Printers, prepress services and publishers (of any type) are eligible to compete for the CIPPI awards. Winners are selected by a panel of judges who are independent of any systems vendor or companies that may be eligible for the award. The review panel of judges includes Patrick Cahuet, senior associate at 1PRIME-concept (France), Stephan Jaeggi, president of PrePress-Consulting (Switzerland), William C. Lamparter, president and principal of the PrintCom Consulting Group, John Leininger, professor in the Department of Graphic Communications at Clemson University, Tetsuo Kimura, president of PrinTechno Inc. and James E. Harvey, CIP4's executive director who serves as the nonvoting chair of the review panel. (See http://www.cip4.org/cippi/review_panel.html) Applications for the awards are due to CIP4 not later than June 22, 2007. The winners will be announced at IGAS in Tokyo, Japan during the third week of September. "Last year German printers pretty well dominated the CIPPI awards," said CIP4 CEO Chair Margaret Motamed of EFI. "I know that several Japanese companies have expressed an interest in competing and there are a few US printers that have recently finished some pretty exciting implementations of JDF, so we are expecting this year to have broader global participation." The CIPPI awards was established in 2005 in order to recognize leading printers, publishers, or prepress services that have demonstrated uncommon leadership in their pursuit of process automation technology Additional. "The applications for the CIPPI awards provide detailed information about the technical and mainly economical benefits of a particular JDF installation," said Jaeggi. "This information can help new users as a guideline for what to expect from a successful JDF project." Application forms, procedures for the contest, details on the evaluation of applications, and the winning 2005 and 2006 CIPPI case studies can be found at information on CIP4 fellows can be found at http://www.cip4.org/cippi/. The CIPPI award is named after the late Jürgen Schönhut of the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt Germany. Mr. Schönhut was a founding member of CIP4 whose contribution was instrumental in creating both CIP4 and its predecessor, the CIP3 Consortium (for more information on Jürgen Schönhut see http://www.cip4.org/cippi/juergen_schoenhut.html).