Kodak is working towards extending its Prinergy into the press room and on to finishing to deliver an end to end automation flow to help increase efficiencies and reduce costs.
The company has a presence in the press room through Nexpress machines and Prosper inkjet presses as well as in a litho environment to the point that plates are made. It is ambitious to go further, according to vice president of digital print Todd Bigger.
“We are looking at developing something similar to Zaikio,” he says. “We want to connect across all areas and into print workflows, because we believe that connectivity across all work areas and the sharing of data will allow customers to gain efficiencies.”
There has been a deal with machine learning and AI development house PerfectPattern to embed its SPrint One AI imposition planning technology deeper into Kodak‘s Prinergy. This takes an agreement first reached four years ago into a deeper integration, with Kodak gaining access to the source code for the software.
PerfectPattern is already integral to the Dynamic Print Planning Service which handles job ganging and press planning in a single processing step.
And its AI and machine learning software has been used by Cimpress for its online trade printing business as well as by Sappi for its OctoBoost initiative. Kodak‘s intention is to achieve a tighter integration and so achieve further benefits from automation, including time and materials savings.
Prinergy has long taken a Rules Based Automation approach. With SPrint One those rules can be more sophisticated and have the flexibility to cope with changing circumstances.
With further integration into the press management systems, Kodak will gain access to performance information that can be used at the prepress stage to improve margins. For example, data from the press can result in ink consumption figures that Kodak can use to compare against different levels of under colour removal or different screening.
The location for this future is in the cloud, using the Prinergy on Demand version of the workflow. There are advantages for both supplier and printer from handling data in the cloud. Kodak can simplify version control and integrations.
All users will be running the same version of the system as upgrades, like those on a mobile phone, take place simultaneously. It can track data and usage from the almost 400 installations worldwide that are using Prinergy in the cloud to some extent.
Analysis of this data, and feeding it through an AI engine, will result in optimised ways of working. And the more data there is, the more refined the system becomes. This harnessing of data is part of the opportunity a freemium version of Prinergy on Demand creates. “Customers want to eliminate capital costs,” Bigger says.
This is a turnkey solution that is available for 90 days before the first subscription payment is made. A systems architect will be available for those 90 days to produce via APIs the integrations meaning the customer will be earning money through the workflow before beginning to pay for it.
Provision of the solutions architect will also accelerate the transition from the legacy workflow to the Kodak platform, something that might take up to 18 months in normal circumstances, while customers run two workflows in parallel.
And as the data mountain grows, the benefits to the printer increase. “We will be able to identify cost centres and bottlenecks by comparing that user with industry benchmarks and delivering more efficient ways of working using AI,” says Bigger.
Kodak will continue to work with JDF, but will be using APIs to go beyond areas covered by JDF to be more flexible in delivering bespoke solutions rather than pushing customers into working within the standardised approach, which is the strength of JDF.
The established format is being used where Kodak is integrating with MIS providers. There has been extensive work with Tharstern in the UK and with Dataline Solutions, whose MultiPress MIS is expanding beyond its Benelux home base. This delivers a seamless flow from the estimating stage to the booking in of a job, file submission, reporting job progress through to generation of the invoice.
At several sites in Europe the integration between Dataline and Kodak also includes Komori, though there is no formal connection to the press manufacturer that has expressed its desire to create greater levels of automation. The partnership is not restricted to Dataline, says VP workflow sales Kodak Eamer, Peter Hulsmans. It also has a strong relationship with Tharstern.
“The team there is fast at developing within the software,” he says. “It can be more difficult with Cerm or EFI.” These are not quite the open systems that are the way forward for both developers and printers.
Kodak wants to expand beyond a prepress workflow into a business wide system that is gathering information from all aspects of the business to help it become more efficient.
