Patent ID: 8195321

Claim:
A method for progressively tracking and controlling processing of a plurality of individual physical items required to produce a finished hard copy document product for transport to a destination location, as a result of a production run, through a sequence of processes executed in a workflow procedure intended to produce the finished product, the method comprising steps of: (A) initializing a workflow template identifying each of the plurality of individual items, one or more machines use to produce the finished product, a plurality of processes to be executed by the one or more machines to transform individual items from one state to another, in an order of a sequence of the processes defined in accord with a workflow procedure, and relationships between individual items; (B) starting the production run, to produce the finished product, in accordance with the workflow procedure; (C) during the production run, recording at each respective process executed in the workflow procedure upon completion of item transformation by the respective process, at least: i) an identification value assigned to at least one of the plurality of individual items upon which the respective process has been executed; and ii) the identification value assigned to a machine resource which executed the respective process on the at least one individual item; and (D) before at least one respective process is executed in the workflow procedure: a) analyzing the recorded data for one or more of the items to be processed by the one respective process, and b) permitting execution of the one respective process only upon determining that each of one or more of items to be processed by the one respective process has been transformed through all processes preceding the one respective process and in the order for the preceding processes as specified by the defined sequence.