PrintExpress Tracker

Tracker provides a management overview of newspaper production.

A plan is set up to describe the structure of each publication and the corresponding production schedule. The tracker then tracks production against this plan, showing the progress of production and warning if it falls behind the schedule.

Tracker has three main elements :

(i) a server or "workflow engine" which is basically a tracking data base. This may run on the main PrintExpress server or on a separate machine as required.
(ii) a planner client which is used to set up production plans on the server. This is a java application which will normally be run on a PC workstation.
(iii) a tracker client which is used to monitor production. This can run on a standard web browser or can be provided as a stand alone java applet for improved reliability and performance. This can be run on any workstation (PC, Mac or Sun) on the intranet making the tracker a universally available production monitoring tool.

The Planner

The planner is used to set up the product structure for each publication in terms of editions, sections and colour content of pages. The planner makes extensive use of templates to reduce the need for repeated entry of common information. Thus a template can be defined and then updated with publication date and pagination details for daily production.

Clearly to be able to plan and track a publication it is essential to be able to identify "jobs" or pages. The key to this is a naming convention. PrintExpress has always been very flexible with regards to jobnames and Tracker continues this. For each publication a naming convention can be defined with either fixed length fields for codes for each attribute, or variable length fields with a specified delimiter.

The steps through which a job will pass are pre-defined so that the tracker can track the progress of each job through the system. This can be called "workflow". The planner contains a workflow editor to allow the workflow associated with each publication to be specified.

Workflow

Within PrintExpress jobs pass from process to process according to the system configuration. At each step messages are generated and fed to the "log master" which saves them in a log file. The log master also sends these messages to the tracker where they are used to update the tracking data base. Setting up the tracker workflow involves specifying a number of "tasks" corresponding to the steps through which the jobs are to be tracked.

The workflow editor allows tasks to be defined by specifying corresponding message parameters, and linked together to form a workflow. As messages are received by the tracker they are matched against the tasks that have been defined, and the status of the job is updated.

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