Site Flow Workflow Automation
all right we will now jump into the automation part of this service cast and specifically we will start by showing a very requested feature which is the auto print the bot sheet and its options um this is found at the product component production level the goal is of course to reduce the manual intervention and repetitive clicks and this came from the need to automatically print the bat sheet when the batch is either created or sent to the device um some of you may want to automatically print the batch sheet as soon as the batch is created or as soon as the batch is sent to the device the goal is to create a more efficient process so that you don't have to manually print out the bat sheet every time this event occur uh the bat sheet can now be printed automatically based on uh prior configuration in the product component uh without having to take any additional manual steps after making the necessary configurations so let's take a look in the details of this feature i will be showing the four options available uh to print the bat sheet and these are atbot creation and send to device at printer and then we also have the manual option all right so we are on the product component production section uh you can choose the uh add batch creation option if you want the batch sheet to be printed as soon as the batch is created when you select the add batch creation option the bot sheet autoprint option is mandatory um it is mandatory to select the add printer this way uh the batch sheet will be printed on the selected printer as soon uh uh when when the new batch is created so the add printer is mandatory when the uh add batch creation option is selected the second option available for the autoprint of the bot sheet is the at send to device if you prefer to have the bot sheet printed when the botch is sent to the device then you will see that the at printer option is uh becoming optional for this case um the option allows to configure the system to print the batch sheet automatically to a designated printer when the batch is sent to the device if you leave the at printer field empty um the bat sheet will be sent automatically to the bat sheet printer defined in the device to which you are sending the batch so uh I've put here a big warning because you need to make sure that the device has a uh batch printer configured in case you leave the field empty in the product so uh the printer configured in the at printer field overrides the batch sheet printer configured in the device the batch sheet printer defined on the device is used by default so just to recap the precedence will be the product component production printer otherwise the printer configured on the device level lastly uh you have also the option to manually print your batch sheet uh and for this case you need to keep uh uh the batch sheet auto print field blank moving on uh continuing on the new additions in the automation workflow uh it is now possible to automatically send to the finishing devices from the printing device this new functionality explained here is that when using JMF types job submission site gets a me uh site gets a message when the print is completed and once site flow receives this me message you now have the option to both sending a JDF template to a finishing device and moving the batch to the next event in site flow workflow which will be also visible in the production work to list uh you will be able of course to see this uh in the demo that will be presented by Chad um in our last section of the service cast so you will be able to watch the E2E automated workflow during uh using two different JDF templates uh to two different uh uh devices the main feature we want to highlight here is that the whole flow happens automatically from an initial work plan condition a batch can automatically be sent to a device using a JDF template assigned in the work plan and from that printing device it can be configured now to automatically send to the finishing device via another JDF template assigned also on the work plan and move to the next event via JMF response when the event is completed for the workflow we will be reviewing today our goal is to implement an auto send feature that triggers based on specific conditions within our work plan the work plan used is showing a condition which can be based on anything available in the dropdown could be reprints item attributes etc which will be which will be able to send uh the job to either press A and press B now thanks to um these new features in the work plan you can use different JDF templates based on the press chosen so you can see in this case we have press A which is using uh on auto send to device as soon as the batch is created and using this default JDF template but you can also see that you can configure press B with an a different auto send to device so in this case it's 3 hours before uh the scheduled production time and it's using also a different JDF uh furthermore the automation for sending the batch to the device has now three autosand to device options available as I was just showing um these are available of course in the work plan settings the auto send when the batch closes um the batch file will be sent automatically when the bucket is closed and when the batch in position file is ready the auto send 3 hours before scheduled production start is another option and the third one is the auto send when the previous event is completed so site flow will now uh send automatically the batch file when the batch is scanned from the previous event uh it is important to note that this is only available for uh the default device very well so based on the uh automation options once the batch has been automatically sent to the print device we now have the capability for two main actions the first one is the auto sending to the next physical device when the print event is completed and the second one is the automatic moving of the botch to the next event in site flow right for the first option so when uh auto the um we auto send to the next physical device there are two important settings to have in the work plan the first one is the auto send when the previous event is completed which needs to be on the second event of the work plan here we call it finish it's marked in orange and the second um point is that the JDF assigned in the second step of the work plan needs to have a specific configuration to trigger the send to the finished device and Chad will be showing these settings later okay at the same time you can also have the event automatically marked as complete and moved to the next event in site flow and get the responses from the device to the send to device status in the batch UI the important settings are now on the device level rather than in the work plan the print device needs to be a JMF workflow uh uh because of the birectional communication so that cylo can receive the response to trigger the automation to the next event the toggle needs to be on this triggers the auto send uh of the batch when the previous event is completed and when site receives the printed JMF response from the device the subbatch will move to the next work plan event before uh the final E2E demo uh let me quickly recap for you the main settings that been we've been reviewing right now in the work plan and in the device so for this I'm I'm just going to go very quickly to the UI so uh we have started with a condition in the workflow this will go to press A or press B i just wanted to show you where these settings are in the work plan so you see here we have press A with the auto send to device uh when the batch is created we have this JDF template assigned here and the important part for this for the press is that um you will need I'm going to show you now the device settings and we have specified just now that um it needs to be a JMF uh workflow and the toggle to uh enable the JMF response is here and you also have the uh informative uh panel of the subbatch will be moved to the next work plan event when site flow receives the printed JMF response from the device on the other hand our finishing device will have a production phase here and it's a JDF uh filetofolder type of workflow all right and lastly we also mentioned that we're going to be seeing the responses um of the um of the JMF on the center to device state in our uh sub batch details i will continue now with um the last um uh slide so I'm sure that by now everyone is wondering how do I know which JDF template is going to be used so let's review it together um we know that the JDF template can be defined in uh three different places the first one that we just seen is in the work plan uh the second one is in the product configuration and here in the product configuration there are two other places where the JDF template can be configured and it is in the attributes so via a lookup attribute or in the product uh uh in the production product production tab right um so we usually recommend to remove uh the one from the component production tab when you use a computed attribute uh to assign the right JDF and the last place where you can define the JDF is inside the device details so uh the work uh the work plan TDF is used only if the autosand is configured in it the order of priority is um summarized in this table and it basically means that uh the work plan JDF template is going to be the first one chosen then you will pick the device JDF template then you will go to the two batch the lookup attributes and finally the product JDF template at the device level if we uh send the subbatch to another device then the device JDF will be used if there is uh one specified there if there is no work plan JDF no device JDF then the user can override the JDF set by default to a certain soup batch by going into the batch details and changing it there and changing it there manually uh this one will be used over the product JDF template if no JDF template is defined in none of these places site flow will use the default JDF template of uh or or the latest uh uh JDF template used very well um I'm now going to uh move on to our final part of the service cut and Chad will take over from here and we'll walk you through the end to end test workflow using two different JDF templates for printing and finishing devices in this case uh one of the JDF is configured for uh a smart stalker finishing machine leaving to you Chad thank you Nobella uh are you able to see my screen almost there yes yes so to uh prevent some waiting and and and watching while we're doing this demo we've presubmitted an order that went into site flow uh using the same workflow that Noel had just described so there's this the split conditional with the two different presses and then a finishing device at the end right here so this has already batched we've created batch 1066 here and it is currently in the print work center if you see here um if I look at the details on this we have this set up to automatically send to device so if I click on this batch subbatch you can see that the uh the statuses here have updated so we've sent it to device and it is being sent by workforce worker so if this was done manually by an operator that would show the operator's name but since this is being done automatically by uh workforce in the background then you'll see that these workforce workers here are updating the job as it goes so it succeeded successfully delivered to the device uh and then that was that happened what 5 10 minutes ago 20 minutes ago um so behind the scenes this is generating a JDF template to go to the HP production pro DFE so if I look at that under the template section uh without going into too much detail this is a JDF template designed for digital printing so it's got information like where the the print file is here uh quantity templates things like that the second part of this flow so we're going here after the printing is completed we're going to go to a in this case a Horizon Smart Stacker which is a finishing device that's able to be driven through JDF so we're going to need a different format of JDF to drive this type of device and if I go look again into our templating section here this is a very different looking JDF format this is called late crimp if anybody is familiar with finishing JDF uh which stands for layout uh cur and imposition i can't remember what the CR is sorry uh but basically this is going to define a printed stack of media that's going to be delivered to the device and then how that's going to be cut and finished and placed into stacks so this is something that we come up with uh for some of our customers to automate their finishing after printing is completed so two separate templates one is defining printing and one is defining finishing so if I go back to my subbatch we can see again that this is in the print state right here if I go I'm going to switch over to our production pro DF right now I can see that batch 1066 has successfully been delivered to the DFE through JDF uh the job is already ripped and printed at the print device we don't have a print or a press here to actually physically print the the job during the demo but what we can do is go onto the press controller here find that batch and then I can manually set printing to done and this will trigger the same JMF activities behind the scenes that physically printing the job would and this for demonstration purposes this will trigger this flow okay if I go back into the all jobs list you'll see now that the the job will complete with the little green check mark here and if I go back into SiteFlow refresh this page I can see that there's no longer a job in the print work center but there is one in the finishing work center so this job is automatically completed in the print setting based off of the JMF that was sent from the print production pro device uh just kind of a side note this automation through JMF is currently only supported for HP enabled JMF devices um it is standard JMF behind the scenes that we're using for this so if there is a third party device that sends us the the JMF format that we're looking for it should work but we've only validated this with HP supported devices right now um again if I click on this I can see the different stages here uh I can see that again it was completed automatically and then sent to the next device through the workforce worker again this is done because we configured the uh auto send to the next step based off of the completion of the previous device in the work center here that Novella went over earlier um you can see this is auto sending to a device when the previous event is completed so as soon as that press triggered automatically the print completion then we automatically sent the next step to the finishing device here so if I go back I this device is set up as a JDF to a hot folder device on the DF and we set up a folder basically just a dummy hot folder on the DF to to show how this works so if I go to that hot folder location uh this is just a random folder that we created on the on the DF for for demo purposes but this would actually point to the smart stack or device in your environment if you were trying to drive this um you can see that I've automatically gotten a JDF generated in this folder and if I open this up this is a pretty complex layer crimp JDF defined to generate the stacks or the the cut stacks for this device so we can see that this has automatically completed the the work center inflow and delivered the JDF for the next stage so that you should just be able to move your stack of paper over into there all your JDF settings are ready to go and finish so nice automation capability here i'm going to talk quickly about one other thing that we didn't really mention um and that's the addition of another trigger that we've added in site flow uh so if you go into triggers the ability to create postbacks based on certain events we've added a new trigger called subbatch JMF response and I just that so subbatch JMF response will actually send the outgoing and incoming or returning JMF messages that were sent to that JMF enabled device uh and I've set up here uh basically a free online website called Pipedream uh has the ability to capture postbacks just for testing purposes uh but if I go to that pipedream application right now I can see that I've gotten a new event based off of the completion messages so when site flow got the JMF completion message from the production pro it also triggered a postback that I configured up so I can go look at that here and I'm going to copy this out of here because this is really difficult to see i got the wrong one in here i can I can walk you through it here in the uh in the pipe dream UI but basically the the JMF message that was sent back from the DF and captured in site flow it can also be pushed out into a a postback so if you want to capture the information in the actual JMF from the production pro you have that capability now some of the things that is very helpful with that is this JMF URL right here uh the sorry the uh the return JDF ticket URL so if I copy this path here and open that on the DF this is actually the modified return JDF ticket i don't know if any of you have dealt with this before but this modified JDF return ticket actually gives you the production information that happened on the device so if I want to see how long this job took to rip or how long it took to print if I want to see how many sheets were printed or the number of impressions that were printed that's all available in here since I simulated the printing on here a lot of the information is missing but again that's another powerful capability we've added to Site Flow in order to get that information uh and one other thing to talk about uh the ability for us to generate the JDF that goes to the smart stacker in this template here oh sorry too many templates open in order to generate this JDF template that goes to the Horizon Smart Stacker we've actually added the imposition information for the batch batch imposition into the the payload for JDF so that has opened up a lot of capabilities for us to automate finishing devices because now we have all of the the Nup the the crop marks the the bleed information like that is all available in that JDF payload so technically any uh JDF enabled device or any device that can be automated through some kind of XML JSON type uh file can be automated from Cyclone now so I know that was a lot to cover in a short amount of time um if there's any questions here please let us know good i'm assuming you all understand that completely and can just go off and automate your own systems feel free to reach out for us tracy did address a question that arrived already so I'm sure there will be more probably yeah we're we're currently deploying this at a couple of customer sites right now that have uh Horizon Smart Staggers but there are other JDF enabled finishing devices out there so if you're looking to automate some of that in your workflow please reach out to us and we'll see what we can do to help you
2025-04-20 11:46
