Here is an interesting piece from Dr. Joe of WhatTheyThink.com titled, “June 10 Economic Webinar Q&A.” This bit on the average number of employees at a printer and it’s potential relation to graphic designers taking on more of the role of prepress is what I wanted us to zoom in on here:

Q.  Is the average size of successful printing companies increasing or decreasing? Sales volume and or employee count as a measure.

A. Sales are down and our industry has a habit of calibrating itself by adding or shedding businesses as needed. The inflation-adjusted sales per employee is actually remarkably steady, which indicates this. The average size of a commercial printing business has been on a very slow decline for decades. It was around 26 employees in the late 1980s and was just above 19 by 2006. That says more about desktop publishing replacing prepress than it says about anything else.
Source: http://members.whattheythink.com/home/drjoe269.cfm  Read more... (460 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

Source: Press release issued by the company, unless otherwise noted.

June 10, 2008 – Rampage Systems of Waltham, MA announced that Version 11 of the Rampage Workflow System is shipping and improves the performance of PDF Trap Engine by as much as 75 percent. Rampage Systems introduced PDF Trap Engine in 2006 to help printers deal with PDF files containing transparent effects.

Quad Core Workstation Offers Further Gains – The speed improvements to the software are compounded by the company’s move to faster workstations based on Quad Core Xeon processors. Kevin McSweeney, Rampage Vice President of Sales and Marketing, said, “Speed was our primary focus for this initial release. The majority of our customers will see speed improvements of 300 percent by running Version 11 on our Quad Core workstation. In other words, they will be running faster software on faster hardware.”

Threaded RIP Option Doubles Performance – Version 11 also marks Rampage’s introduction of an option that runs two software RIPs on a single workstation. The Threaded RIP option nearly doubles the performance of a conventional system. For an existing Rampage customer, the cumulative effect of running Version 11 with the Threaded RIP option is a speed improvement of 300 to 700 percent depending on configuration.  Read more... (388 words, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)

This Drupa may prove nothing else than the show where they all just got along. Take this example, which includes some form of preflighting (Let’s call that postflighting maybe.); Xerox’s FreeFlow workflow collection of approved vendor solutions and products which now includes FUJIFILM Workflow XMF and Heidelberg Prinect as possible connections to the extended Xerox flow.

The FUJIFILM Workflow XMF has some interesting possibilities, as this article on WhatTheyThink.com highlighted;

“XMF provides pre-flighting, native file conversion to PDF, color management, single-click imposition, and job management capabilities. It also enables electronic proofing with a three-dimensional view of the job, permitting the proofer to flip through virtual pages to check flow and alignment as well as color.”
SOURCE: WhatTheyThink.com

It is good to see major, competing vendors working together to help provide a link between all of these various tools in use at any given shop. This spirit of cooperation is exactly what JDF needs to finally succeed… maybe. In any event it is announcements like these that give promise to truly automated workflows. Now, how to we ensure that everything that is fed into these workflows is print-ready? FlightCheck.