The Case for Post-Composition and Why It’s Integral in Print Factories

Hello. In this session, we’ll look at the role of post composition or document re-engineering tools in modern production print workflows to see where they fit and why they are important to understand and have available. Historically, composition tools were designed to read raw data from business systems formatted into paginated documents, and then format print output on multiple devices.

Post composition tools were created by inserter manufacturers to allow customers to insert barcodes and other marks to support sophisticated insertion plans, and to drive camera systems which track pieces and support reprint workflows. These tools quickly evolved to provide a full range of print stream processing to support production workflows, including adding and removing pages, adding page numbering, barcodes along with other marks, concatenating documents, facilitating postal processing, splitting streams for different output sites or processes, and merging files for batch output while preparing output for archive and much, much more. At the same time, composition tools have evolved, adding a wide variety of output processing capabilities to their products to eliminate the need for post-processing of their output. If you can accomplish output processing in composition and post composition, the question then becomes where is the right place in your workflow to do it?

Let’s first look at composition tools. Why do output processing using composition tools? Well, the main reason is that you can. Composition tool vendors would argue that doing output processing in the composition tool is doing that right the first time, as opposed to reverse engineering or modifying print streams. Doing it all in the composition tool means doing everything in one pass, which simplifies the workflow and requires less processing power. When done in composition, all of the processing logic to produce the job exists in one application maintained by one team. And finally, you don’t need to buy post composition software if you do it at the time of the initial composition.

Well, that all sounds great, but let’s take a look at the case for post processing. Most print operations are asked to take output and print it. You may not like dealing with this, but it’s just going to happen. This typically comes from sources like mainframe output or reports from an accounting system or various lines of business systems. Most of the time you won’t have control over how these files are created, and the application creating the output may not even be able to generate files in a format that you can use.

The challenge with print streams is that they need to be produced so that they work with your operations related to what your printers, finishing, inserting, and mailing equipment support. It’s likely that you need to do some modifications to these print ready files to make them compatible with your operation. If you get print ready files, it’s likely you’re going to need some post-processing software to do that.

Another common need is when it’s very difficult to make changes to legacy applications on the host system that’s creating the output. Another problem with applying output processing in the composition tools is that many of the operational decisions are baked into the print stream. Things like barcodes, other marks, sort order, batching, segmenting, adding slip sheets, and more. What if you need to run a job at another printer, use a different postal plan, or even printed a different facility?

When using the composition system to do your output processing, you would need to go all the way back up to the composition tool to change it, then reprocess the jobs. Most organizations require composition changes to go through full regression and QA processes, which can take days to complete. With post-processing operations, personnel can decide exactly how they would like to produce the work based upon the conditions on the production floor. This also allows for composed print streams to be easily redirected for disaster recovery, without the need to go back upstream for composition.

If you only have one composition platform, doing output processing in composition could produce consistent results, so your IT team would only need to be trained on one platform and test outputs from that one platform. If you have multiple composition programs, you’ll need to implement all of your output processing across all of them, with the different technologies usually getting slightly different results. If you need to make changes in your operational environment like an inserter upgrade or equipment down, you’ll need to find a composition tool programmer for all of the applications to get them to implement the changes. With post-processing, it’s just one tool, one team, and one set of skills to create consistent results.

One of the key capabilities of post composition software is the ability to combine like work. More than simply concatenating files, this process can be quite complex, including householding, multiple communications from different output jobs into a single envelope, sortation, imposition, postal savings, and a lot more. Composition systems can create smaller individual print jobs, and if you’re not doing post-processing, you have to run each of these smaller jobs. With post-processing, operations can perform many types of optimizations to these files to leverage economies of scale for processing, handling, printing, inserting, mailing, and distribution. This can cut production and delivery time and cost while automating and streamlining operations.

In print production environments, things are seldom static. When new equipment is added or old equipment is removed, and when any equipment is down, you may need to reprocess files to support different devices. Going back to composition to makes these changes is awkward, expensive, and may have a longer turn times, jeopardizing your SLAs.

Another area where post composition is really useful is around enabling different workflows. Since post-processing not only allows you to recreate pieces, but you can format them for a different printer, inserter and distribution plan and even add them to the next day’s run. While this may be possible with composition, it’s a lot harder. And again, what if you have multiple composition systems? That workflow gets very complicated.

In production, there’s a saying that downtime is for frown time. Post composition tools can be used to fix a wide variety of problems that originate in the composed output. When your operation is in a production down situation, you need as many options as possible to get things back on track, and adding the composition team to the fixed cycle time can be a problem. Operations like to be self-sufficient and don’t want to wait for somebody in the composition area to troubleshoot things. Post composition allows you to run through a number of fixes in your own area to quickly resolve issues. It might not be able to fix everything, but it can fix a lot, and it can reduce cycle times for issue resolution to keep meeting your production requirements and SLA obligations on track.

It makes intuitive sense that when you own a composition tool that supports output processing, it would be cheaper just to use the tool to do the job. However, when you take a look at what you pay for, all the output processing modules required in your favorite comp tools, and then do the same thing for all of the composition tools you own, you’ll likely find that you’re paying a lot more than you thought for these capabilities, and typically more than it would cost to solve the same problem using post composition tools. Also, all of the changes that need to be made there are usually done by IT composition tool programmers. These programmers are typically more costly than operations personnel, and usually have longer turn times for the work they do and other projects that could be working on. When you take all of this into account, you may find that you’re not saving any money at all.

Let’s take a look at an example of how all this works with a case study at a large service bureau where over half of the files they receive are print ready format, and the rest are composed using one of over 15 composition tools that they’ve accumulated over the years. All of the work is converted to PDF when entering the system, and then put into an archive system if requested. Production files, whether from print ready files submitted by customers or from composition platforms, are converted as needed and handled in PDF format. This provides a common way to manage and monitor workflows regardless of the source of the documents.

The composition tools are used for output processing for some files, but these jobs are basically unicorns that bypass or kind of shoehorned into this process. Having a dashboard is critical, so they have a single pass process that notes page counts, packages, postage, and everything else. That’s important regardless of where those jobs came from. Post composition is where they handle this because it’s aware of reprints and any last minute changes made in operations like sending jobs to different printers.

For operations that have 1 or 2 composition systems and don’t get any print ready files, using composition for output processing can make sense, but for most operations, post composition software makes a lot of sense and remains a critical part of operational infrastructures.

Another case study example is related to the benefits of modifying the page layout in post composition is with IWCO. They installed new inkjet web presses, and the margins needed for barcodes and other marks for the press were half an inch different than what the existing equipment used. This chip out area is printed but then removed with the inline cutters. To accommodate this half inch difference, they would have had to upgrade their cutters that relied on fixed blade positions to use variable blades at a cost in the six figures. To further complicate this, they have thousands of composition templates for their client base, so modifying them at the source was not practical. Using Solimar’s Rubika post composition solution enabled them to quickly make the adjustments for the different chip out areas needed for various application types with the existing output, avoiding the need to upgrade the finishing equipment or modify their composition processes. Many case studies like this, along with videos, are available on our website that provide additional details about various workflows and solutions.

Thank you for your time. We hope you found this session helpful, and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.