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.

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.

As all my colleagues in the Marketing Communications group of EAMER, I gave a hand for the preparation and organization of the truck tour. I was thus very happy to have the opportunity to see it "life" in Ratingen where the truck made its first stop in Germany at a customer site, DocuPoint Rhein-Ruhr GmbH.

The day started with some generic presentations of the products and solutions offered by Kodak. These served as an introduction for the afternoon sessions, visit of the printer facilities and unforgettable tour in the truck.



All visitors could spend some time at the Kodak NexPress 2100 Plus Digital Color Production Press. They could see it running and get a flavour of its capabilities. Although I've seen it already several times in action, I still take any chance to see the sheets going in and around when the press is opened.

In the truck, many stopped at the digital print bar where they could "feel the difference" with the Kodak NexPress Dimensional printing samples. It clearly showed their interest in this new application that can give finished printed jobs a unique appearance.




Customers and prospects could get the latest information in whatever technology was of interest for them, be it the latest APEX system, the Magnus 4up, the Workflows or Kodak NexPress M700. The Kodak staff was there to help and make sure a personalized attention was given to each of them.

Still many destinations to go in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, so still plenty of opportunities for you to go and visit it. I can tell you, it's worth the trip.
Tschüss!