Summary

The modernisation of newspaper companies with computerised pre-press departments and highly automated printing presses and mailroom is today one of the biggest revolution in our industry. However, total production management using computer-based tracking and active process control is almost absent from newspaper production. In the future, pre-press, press, mailroom and distribution control systems will be linked to form an integrated newspaper production management system. The first step towards total production management in newspapers is to be able to build a global production tracking system. Today, there are existing local tracking systems in the different areas of newspaper production from pre-press to press, mailroom and distribution. However, there are no pre-defined conventions to enable these systems to communicate with each other. IFRA recognised the lack of standards in this area and worked on a recommendation for the interconnection of local production tracking systems from different manufacturers used in newspapers. An IFRA Production Tracking Working Group has been formed at the beginning of 1994 to work on this new IFRAtrack recommendation. The Working Group defined an open model for the exchange of information between local tracking systems. The aim of this report is to explain the background and the objectives of the work made by this group of experts that have built this recommendation. This recommendation is independent from the system vendor and the platform used. For the newspapers, the fact that a local tracking system is able to handle IFRAtrack messages is a guarantee that the system will be able to communicate with other subsystems. We do hope that this work will find acceptance in the industry and that it will be of benefit to our members.