Competitive products, efficient utilization of resources and good customer service are, in the long run, a question of survival in most businesses. Newspaper publishing is no exception.

The activities in the front-end area as well as in prepress production have, due to open systems, de facto standards and increased performance, become almost totally digital. Digital prepress production and the development of standardized network protocols and reasonably priced communication costs, facilitate remote printing — the location of the printing plant can be more flexible. Also the printing plants are now using solutions based more or less on open systems. Examples are press control systems and mailroom equipment.

The last island of isolation is the distribution area, but it is only a matter of years before trucks and carriers can be tracked in real time at a reasonable price. The telecom industry can provide wireless services and terminals already, but at the moment the costs might not be justified.

Altogether, the development of high-performance information technology means new conditions for newspaper publishing. One consequence is the hard competition from “substitute” products and services that draw attention from readers and advertisers with reduced margins as a result. But the same technology can also be used to make the production less resource consuming and more flexible and to support improved quality of the products, as well as large productivity improvements.

The present infrastructure — in terms of networks, databases and computers — is an important tool in order to obtain automation, better control and a more flexible production. The openness of the systems can be used to bridge the system islands and to enable inter-system communication on a business-wide level (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 — An example of dynamic information changing on a day-to-day or even minute-to-minute level in newspaper operations. Many of the organizational islands are also islands in terms of technology.
click to enlarge image


But is there really a need for new information technology systems? Can newspaper operations be more competitive and profitable through use of more information technology? The answer is probably yes in most cases. The IT systems used today are often islands of automation and to bridge the system islands, costly manual routines and slack in terms of time buffers are used to be able to manage the different deadlines. The potential savings are substantial if the information management is automated on a business-wide level, enabling increased utilization of production resources, reduction of manual routines and elimination of slack. Large cost savings can be obtained — 5 percent to 10 percent productivity improvements in the area of production and distribution have been realized.

A business-wide management system can include functions for tracking, scheduling, control and analysis (see Fig. 2). The system collects and refines information from the different local systems and serves the overall organization with information regarding schedules, real-time status information, decision support and reports. Similar solutions, such as supply chain management systems, are rapidly growing in many other industries boosting their productivity.

Fig. 2 — The concept of business-wide 
management systems.

IfraTrack 3.0: XML-based information exchange

The technical development and the open systems have made inter-system communication less complicated. But still, there is a need for a common structure with respect to terminology and information exchange mechanisms.

Ifra (www.ifra.org) has developed the IfraTrack recommendation — a set of specifications specially designed to support standardized information exchange between newspaper systems. The IfraTrack recommendation supports information exchange on a business-wide level and covers the main production stages from product planning and ad sales to final delivery. The recommendation contains a newspaper product model; a process model and a message format based on eXtensible Markup Language. IfraTrack is object-oriented and a number of objects and their associated attributes are defined. Additional objects, attributes and links can be added in a standardized way.

The model includes a number of critical process stages: production planning, ad production, page make-up, prepress production, printing, mailroom operations, and distribution. Within every process stage different activities are defined. The activities generate output in terms of objects (ads, images, articles, pages, films, plates, copies, etc.).

In the IfraTrack recommendation, a number of newspaper production-related products, processes, object classes and states have been defined. The state of an object is modified through processes. The IfraTrack recommendation includes object definitions, semantics, syntax, and suggested message exchange mechanisms.

The present version, IfraTrack 3.0, is based on XML. The introduction of XML means that standard tools can be used in order to validate and interpret the IfraTrack messages. The XML schemata also make it possible to add functionality to IfraTrack 3.0 in a structured way (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 — An IfraTrack message according to the latest XML-based 3.0 version. When starting to RIP the black separation of a page a raster image processor supporting IfraTrack might send this message.

The IfraTrack recommendation is coordinated with the JDF workflow. Job Definition Format is developed by a number of large European graphic arts industry vendors. The objective is to make JDF and IfraTrack compatible.

IfraTrack-based solutions

The people behind the Swedish company Media Workflow Management AB have been pioneers in the field of business-wide management systems for newspapers. In the early 1990s a research group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, started to develop prototypes of business-wide tracking systems for the newspaper industry. The projects were carried out with support from a number of large Swedish newspaper groups and the Swedish Newspaper Publishers Association. In 1997, the group presented the world’s first completely IfraTrack-based prototype (see Fig. 4). The prototype was installed in full operation at Östgöta Correspondenten, a 67,000-daily regional newspaper in Linköping, Sweden.

Fig. 4 — Tracking of page make-up, prepress and printing in the MWM-system. The operations are monitored using one single application. In this case six different local systems are sending IfraTrack-messages in real-time.

MWM was formed in early 1998 by a group of the former researchers and Östgöta Correspondenten. MWM, together with the German company PPI, is one of the driving forces in the development of IfraTrack-based solutions today. Many European newspaper vendors support IfraTrack and can send IfraTrack messages from their systems. MWM has a business-wide solution that can handle incoming messages from multiple local systems. Besides the different standardized IfraTrack systems provided, many of the new newspaper systems developed over the last couple of years have been designed with support from the IfraTrack recommendation.

The MWM system is running at multiple sites in the Nordic area. The system is mainly used by national and regional newspaper and newspaper distribution companies. But IKEA, a furniture company, is also using the MWM system for the production of the IKEA catalog — one of the world’s largest printed publications with a circulation exceeding 100 million copies and a large number of editions.

The technical platform of the MWM system is similar to many modern Internet-based solutions and includes the following features:

• Three-tiered database, object-server and browser or client applications

• Java-based

• Modular design

• Platform independent

• TCP/IP communication

• IfraTrack-based information exchange

• Web, e-mail and hardcopy reports

The workflow management can cover activities in several different companies involved in the process, including:

• One or several publishing houses and subcontractors (circulation, advertising, editorial, prepress)

• One or several production plants (prepress, printing, postpress, loading)

• One or several distribution companies (transportation, delivery)

Besides the tracking of the digital processes in prepress and production plants, the system can also visualize the workflow of the distribution. The MWM system does not replace any local systems, but automates the manual work and provides business-wide status and decision support information in real time. Through use of one single Web or client application the production can be monitored from product planning to delivery from any computer with access to the network.

In the data warehouse of the system, data covering product, production, and distribution is stored and used for automatic report generation and in-depth analyses.

MWM has, together with the Swedish telecom company Ericsson, integrated the MWM system with a number of mobile networks in Sweden in order to provide mobile messaging to and from truck drivers and carriers hired by four of the largest newspaper distribution companies in the country.



Fig. 5 — The MWM system at Gothenburgs-Post, a 270,000-daily morning newspaper.

The customers of MWM are in general extremely satisfied with their new business-wide systems. At this stage the installations normally have been phased. A typical installation starts with product planning and prepress tracking and is then extended with interface to front-end systems, press and mailroom systems, and distribution systems. The largest installation at this time is Gothenburgs-Post (daily, 270,000) in Sweden (see Fig. 5). Many more installations will be carried out over the next six months.

Dr. Johan Stenberg is the president of MWM Media Workflow Management AB of Stockholm, Sweden. He started his career in 1988 at the Bonnier Group, one of Scandinavia’s leading publishers. In 1991, he earned a Master of Science in Graphic Arts Technology, and in 1997 he published the doctoral thesis “Global Production Management in Newspaper Production and Distribution — Coordination of Products, Processes and Resources.” He has been working in the newspaper industry since the early 1990s. MWM (www.mwm.se) supplies consultancy services and advanced IT systems to help newspapers identify and implement improvements for their businesses. Stenberg can be reached at +46 86.51.60.52 or via e-mail at johan.stenberg@mwm.se.