Group Joos at Open House Canon: "Setting up the JDF link between our machines and MultiPress went very smoothly."
21 December 2022
Group Joos has three divisions, joined under one roof: Joos Print, Joos Connect and Joos Smartcom. The first division, Joos Print, deals with all kinds of print jobs, such as logistics forms, business documents, security printing, etc. The second division, Joos Connect, primarily handles Direct Mailings and promotional print jobs. And Joos Smartcom, the third division, focuses on data analysis and marketing automation.
The constant challenge within the graphic industry is to make the print production process as smooth as possible. Group Joos, too, has been strongly committed to this for years. They continuously adjust their organisation and machinery to make the many applications run better and more efficiently and they work with many different machines. Recently, Group Joos has invested in two Canon digital print machines: Canon varioPRINT iX 3200 and Canon ProStream. Of course, it remains important that new systems and their various controls are coordinated as efficiently as possible.
Group Joos has been a MultiPress user for many years, and the company has built experience with numerous JDF links. The certified link between MultiPress and the PRISMAsync controller of the new Canon machines represents a large step towards advanced automatisation. Print jobs were previously sent to the prepress and the machines manually, but now thanks to the JDF link, the MultiPress system sends them automatically.
During an open house session at Canon, Didier Haazen, Chief Technology at Group Joos, explained how this process happened: "We invited the Dataline Project Managers for an exploratory discussion. We also talked with Canon and thoroughly read Canon's 'application note'. After that, we have been able to establish the link between our machines and MultiPress quite quickly. That's also what I want as a user. I don't want to spend three months to deal with the JDF."
"MultiPress has an interface where you can establish the JDF link with ease. You connect to a machine via HTTP, you set up a few paper types and that's it. It's that easy! Forwarding the JDF files, linking with production, ... You don't see all of that, but of course you do notice the result: the jobs are prepared for production on the machine with the right paper type and print runs. You can also follow up the production process easily, as the prepress operator can see what is happening at the machine from his MultiPress environment, without having to be there himself."
Group Joos has a lot of future plans. How can they apply this efficient process to their other machines as well? And how do they collect all of the information in one interface instead of three? "We will need to see, but in any case MultiPress and the JDF link facilitate our print production process a lot already and we would like to go one step further with this", Didier Haazen adds.