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

I’ve been in the business for 30 years and I’ve seen a lot of change in that time. I worked in publishing and saw typesetting and conventional film based prepress completely replaced by PC and Mac based desktop publishing. And, in a matter of ten years, we’ve all seen landlines, fax machines, pagers and other technologies be completely replaced. What about post-composition and document re-engineering? Has that too been replaced? Let’s get into it.

Historically, composition tools were designed to read raw data from business systems, format it into paginated documents, and then format print output on multiple output 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 and stamps and other marks, concatenating documents, they facilitate postal processing, split streams for different output sites or processes, merge streams for batch output, prepare 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 number one reason is you can. Comp tool vendors would argue that doing output processing in the composition tool is doing it right the first time, as opposed to reverse engineering or hacking print streams. Doing it all in the comp tool means doing everything in one pass, which simplifies the workflow and it requires less processing power. One and done, clean and simple. When done in composition, all the logic to produce the job exists in one application maintained by one team. And finally, you don’t need to buy composition software if you do it in comp.

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 don’t have to like it. It’s just going to happen. Could be mainframe output, could be reports from an accounting system or just, you know, a different line of business system. Often you have little control how these files are created. The composing application may not even be able to generate files in a format that you can use. The biggest problem with print streams is that they need to be produced so that they work in your operation. They need to support your printer, your inserter, your finishing equipment, mailing equipment, etc. And, it’s likely that they’re not. It’s likely that you need to do some massaging of these print ready files to make them actually print ready in your operation. If you get print ready files, it’s likely you’re going to need post-processing software to do that. 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 on a different printer? Use a different postal plan or even print at a different facility. The use composition to do your output processing, you would need to go all the way back to the composition tool to change and then reprocess jobs.

Most organizations require composition changes to go through full regression and a QA process that 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 ground. This also allows for composed streams to be easily redirected for a disaster recovery without the need to go back upstream for composition.bIf you have only one composition platform, doing output processing in composition will produce consistent results. IT needs to be trained on one platform, and needs to test outputs from that one platform. If you have five composition programs, you’ll need to implement all of your output processing five times with five different technologies, usually getting five 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 comp tool programmer for all of the applications to get them to implement the change. With post-processing, it is one tool, one team, one set of skills and consistent results.

One key capability of post-composition software is the ability to combine like work. More than simply concatenating files, it can be quite complex, including house holding multiple communications from different output jobs into a single envelope, sortation, imposition, and a lot more. Composition creates small jobs. And, if you’re not doing post-processing, you’re stuck with small jobs. With post-processing, operations can perform a ton 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 costs while automating and streamlining operations. Things are seldom static in operational environments. 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 makes these changes awkward, expensive, and may have longer term times jeopardizing your SLA.

Another area where post-processing is really useful is around enabling reprint workflows. 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, downtime is frown time.

Post-composition tools can be used to fix a wide variety of problems that originate in composition output. When your operation is in a production down situation, you need as many options as possible to get things back on track. Adding the composition team to the fix cycle time can be a problem. Operations like to be self-sufficient. You don’t want to wait for somebody in the composition area to troubleshoot things. You want to fix them. You want to generate files quickly. Post-composition allows you to run through a number of fixes in your own area to quickly resolve issues.

Post-composition can’t fix everything, but it can fix a lot and it can reduce cycle times for issue resolution. Quick fixes are a key to meeting tight SLAs. It makes intuitive sense that when you own a composition tool that supports output processing, it would be cheaper just to use that tool to do the job. I would challenge you all out there to take a look at what you pay for all of the output processing modules required in your favorite comp tools. Then, do the same thing for all the composition tools you own. I think you’ll find that you’re paying a lot more than you thought for these capabilities, likely more than it would cost to solve the same problem using post-composition tools. Also, all the changes that need to be made there are made by IT comp tool programmers. These programmers are typically a little more costly than operations personnel and usually have longer term times for the work they do. If you add all of this together, you may find you’re not saving any money at all.

Let’s take a look at an example of how all of this works in the wild. This use case is a very large service bureau. A full half of the files they receive are in print ready format. The rest are composed using one of over 15 composition tools that they have accumulated over the years. All the work is converted to PDF when entering the system. PDF is put in an archive system, if requested. PDFs, whether from print ready files submitted by the customers, or from composition platforms, are managed in PDF format. This provides a common way to manage and monitor workflows regardless of the source of the documents. Composition tools are used for output processing for some files. These jobs are basically unicorns that bypass or are kind of shoehorned into this process. The dashboard part is critical. Seems like having a single process that knows page counts, packages, postage and everything else is really important, regardless of where those jobs came from. Post-composition is the most logical place to handle this in your workflow because post-composition knows about reprints, it knows about any last minute changes made in operations like sending jobs to different printers.

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