Electronic business processes in book production: Applicability of JDF/PrintTalk and Papinet/XBITS

The objective of the project was to analyse the current book production processes in Finland to see the potential for improving the efficiency of the whole production chain with the help of electronic data interchange. The objective was also to propose the vocabularies needed to adopt electronic business processes. This paper includes presents the main points of the work. First, these processes were modeled utilising the UN/CEFACT Unified Modelling Methodology (UMM). Information was gathered by by making interviews and by going through examples of current business documents (request for quote (RFQ), quote, purchase order (PO), order confirmation (OC) and note on transferring shipping addresses from the publisher to the printer). Available versions of JDF and Papinet/XBITS vocabularies were analysed and their expressive capabilities were compared with the requirements of the chosen Finnish business processes. This analysis covered both the business process and data content. JDF aims at including all product and production information into the JDF description of a print job, and this would seem to be the ideal way. This is also a very ambitious goal, which requires JDF capabilities from all programs and production steps that are used to design and make the product. It also has the biggest potential, if we can combine the digital content and business information together. The Papinet/XBITS approach focuses on the information interchange at a level that covers only product information and it does not offer compatibility with the production systems. On the other hand, it focuses on the information interchange between the book publishers and book printers including the use cases for the messages. The XBITS counterpart in JDF approach, the PrintTalk, has not been developed specially for the book industry. The reality is that we will have to learn to live with several vocabularies, or at least with several versions of some vocabulary. The different organisations should put emphasis on ensuring the interoperability of the different vocabularies. Good data vocabularies with explanations of the meaning of the different terms and concepts are needed to make mapping between the different vocabularies possible.