DRUPA, MIS and future directions

Ron Pelley, Training Manager for Q&P Solutions made the trek to Düsseldorf to get first hand experience of the state of the art in MIS.

Exciting, dynamic and other superlatives shrink into insignificance when describing my first visit to DRUPA. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to see the world’s biggest exhibition of print equipment and technology. I spent six solid days at DRUPA visiting every hall several times, researching, attending talks, viewing demonstrations and meeting people.

I visited DRUPA with a planned agenda to research other management information systems developers, to review workflow systems, and to see what this great industry is doing with JDF and all the related acronyms. As well I wanted to see as much of the new machinery technology as I possibly could.

After visiting most Management Information System providers and sitting through sometimes lengthy demonstrations I am firmly convinced that Quote & Print Software is at the forefront of packages available to the industry. I benchmarked our system and as far as content is concerned it is amongst the best.

The areas where we can improve the system further will be addressed as a consequence of DRUPA and user input. For me to list the changes I would like to see made would show our hand to our competitors in Australia and the Asia Pacific region, but I know these suggestions are being embraced and all Quote & Print users will benefit.

The two presses that “knocked my socks off” were the TKS newspaper web and the Komori HSWO press. To see the TKS Color Top 9000 CDH running at 90,000 copies per hour, printing a 12 page tabloid newspaper in full color was a show stopper. Similarly to see three jobs of eight pages and 2000 copies each, made-ready, printed and plate changes completed in less than 15 minutes on the Komori was dynamic. The press speed was 60,000 per hour for each job. Seeing this HSWO press made ready and running at this speed must have caused some concern to sheet fed printers. The quality from both presses left nothing to be desired.

Amongst the other software I reviewed were workflow applications for prepress, imposition programmes both for pre-press (PDF enabled) and for possible integration with our package. There are some very comprehensive workflow prepress and premedia packages available.