JDF/JMF networking between the order processing desk and the printshop has in the meantime become a significant factor in production control and production data acquisition. Customers of alphagraph team, whose print management and costing solutions Printy and Prinance are already the most widely used systems in Germany, with a market share of over 35%, can now look forward to another important application: Networking between Prinance and the LogoTronic professional management system from KBA has now been released for general use, opening the door to bidirectional integration with the printshop.

After a long series of online tests via the Internet, a final "real-life" test was conducted at the KBA facility in Radebeul in April. All the functions were carefully scrutinised one last time and tested under real production conditions on an eight-colour KBA Rapida 106. Alongside checks of the various manually reported production data and simulation of a shift changeover, the individual press counters were verified (waste sheets, job progress and final good sheets).

For this practical test, Prinance was networked with LogoTronic professional in the KBA training centre. The first step was to send prepared job data from Prinance, via JDF to LogoTronic professional, from where the technical parameters for the individual sheets of the job were passed on to the press console computer. The press operator logged in at the console with his personnel ID number accepted the sheet data for makeready on the press, and subsequently reported back on the quantities of waste sheets produced during this preparation phase via JMF. Upon activation of the good-sheet counter, the makeready process was automatically ended and all further data assigned to the job production. The progress of the printing could then be tracked on the press status monitor in Prinance.

This first demonstration was followed by further test scenarios reflecting numerous pre-defined use cases, in order to check the correct feedback to Prinance in every conceivable operating state which could be encountered in actual use. All results confirmed the practical reliability of JDF/JMF networking between Prinance and KBA LogoTronic professional, enabling the system to be released for use by interested customers with immediate effect.