With the economy being what it is, it was great to run across some good news in a back issue of American Printer: Action Printing, a Kodak customer, was elected to the NAPL's Management Plus Hall of Fame.

Action Printing's President, Gregg Davies, credits their success to one single business philosophy — excellence — in employee relations, print quality and service. They empower employees and pull out all of the stops to meet and understand the needs of their clients. But that's only two-thirds of the secret.

"Maintaining a high-level, consultative relationship with our clients and providing consistent quality requires not only a highly trained staff and innovative management, but the ability to move forward with advancing technology," says Davies. "As an example, Action Printing was the first printer in the United States to digitally link its customer service department to its high-speed saddle stitchers, replacing time-consuming hand adjustments with CSR-generated instructions."

The digital link Davies mentioned is actually KODAK UPFRONT Production Planning Software. Using UPFRONT's job building wizard, the CSRs at Action Printing digitally create their folding dummies, plan their jobs, and then export JDF data to automate the setup of their bindery equipment. Adjustments to set fold, cuts and more are no longer manually done. This automation has reduced setup times from 65 to 24 minutes. And wasted plates have declined from 3% to 1.4%. For this achievement, Action Printing received the CIPPI award for best cost/benefit realization from automation. You can read the more on about this story here.

Many of you who were lucky enough to visit drupa this year probably had the same feeling that I always get. When faced with the mind-blowing array of shiny new hardware for this and that application my head starts to spin. It's very easy to see and understand the appeal of all this exciting stuff that will revolutionize print, and in many ways, it is already doing so.

As a 'plate man' you could think it was all a bit intimidating, being told that the day after tomorrow the world as we know it would be no more. 'Offset is dead, long live digital printing' they cry. Well, this may be a bit premature but you get the idea. Does all this intimidate me? No, bring it on I say. Kodak has some great digital printing solutions that are offset class, and the new technology shown at drupa promised even more exciting developments in the near future.

Suppliers to the Offset Printing Industry are not standing still, however. Press manufacturers are driving offset printing costs further down by offering presses in wider formats (more pages per cycle), with more automation (less labor and downtime), and with more speed (higher productivity). Some are expanding into the small format offset area and are reducing the number of wasted sheets at start-up, hence making offset more competitive for short-run high quality jobs.

And in prepress for offset, Kodak just took the benchmark up a peg or two.

If you went up to one of those shiny new platesetters (like the Magnus 800 Z speed running 60 B1 plates per hour) on our booth, and had a look inside, you would have seen Kodak's latest digital offset plate, the Kodak Electra XD Thermal Plate that was formally launched at the show. And, we're pretty excited about it.

So 'what's so special about this plate' I hear you ask. Well, quite a lot actually. Its list of technical performance features is impressive. It's FM10 rated, very robust on-press, has fast exposure, processing speeds, and many good things that help you get the print quality and productivity you need. But that's not the main benefit. The real value to the printer from the Electra XD Plate is exceptional dot stability throughout the whole production process, and especially throughout the print run. This dot stability translates to minimized intervention on press to correct for plate wear effects. It means fewer plate remakes are likely to be necessary and therefore saves time and money with press downtime and restart waste. It's about maintaining colour quality from first to last sheet. It's what actually pays the printer's wages and where money is really made and lost. So, how big a benefit is this in real terms? Well, we think it's potentially huge. But don't take my word for it, give it a try and experience it for yourself. Join the growing band of satisfied Electra XD Plate printers.

My marketing colleagues said 'tell them about the printer in Sweden who ran 1.8 million copies unbaked, or the French printer who achieved 4.5 million baked, or the guy in Belgium printing FM10 and getting real benefits on press'. Well I guess I just did, but I prefer to under-sell and over-deliver.  Anyway, it's not the exceptional results that excite me so much but the fact that I know that all printers may benefit from this new plate technology, no matter what their resolution or run length or productivity requirement.

Judging from the feedback we have had from the market so far, we seem to be 'striking a chord' with many printers. I have no doubt that you will be hearing a lot more about this plate in the future.

I don't have to tell you about negative pressure on pricing and margins. That we all know too well. The latest NAPL State of the Industry Report shows a record decline in commercial printing industry sales of 12 to 14 percent this year. While a modest recovery is being predicted for 2010, NAPL believes there will still be downward pressure on pricing. Add that to print services being increasing commoditized, and it's more important than ever to identify opportunities to reduce costs as a way to improve profitability. A sure fire way to do that is by integrating and further automating what are now independent systems to increase efficiency, and in doing so, drive down costs and grow the bottom line.

To that end, we've provided a unique set of easy to use interactive tools and resources to help you learn about what others are doing and find your own areas for improvement. Sure, we have a name for all of this—MeasureYourBiz.

Central to all of this is Kodak's Unified Workflow Discovery Tool. We're going to show you how to use this online, interactive tool so you can examine the areas of your business step-by-step to see how simplifying and streamlining your workflow will:

• improve production efficiencies
• control costs
• provide real time return on investment.

Interested? Join us for one of the upcoming educational webinars led by Jim Aust, Business Analyst, Kodak. With more than 15 years experience in the industry, Jim will use specific examples taken from his 150 visits to print shops each year. He will share with you his findings in helping these shops benchmark against industry standards and best practices, and how they turned those comparisons into action to benefit their businesses.

The MeasureYourBiz webinars will take place at 1 p.m. EDT on:

• Wednesday, Nov. 4
• Wednesday, Nov. 18

To register, and also watch a video preview of the webinars, visit: www.kodak.com/go/measureyourbiz. In addition, available for download at the website is a free white paper from InfoTrends entitled "Recession Realities: The Year for Digital Efficiency and Effectiveness"— which highlights the new technologies and strategies that businesses can consider in today's difficult economy.