Modern Litho automates the Kodak way

Modern Litho’s workflow and MIS are hosted in the cloud as the company is the first to put Kodak’s Prinergy on Demand through its paces, with benefits expected to follow.

Modern Family was a long running sitcom centred on the tribulations of an extended family living in California. It should not be confused with Modern Litho. This is a growing commercial and direct mail printer operating across five sites in the US mid west, centred on Jefferson City in Missouri. 

The former came to an end after 11 series while the printer has become the first to commit to Kodak’s Prinergy on Demand Business Solutions cloud based automation, comprising Kodak’s Prinergy workflow, the Crimsonwing PrintVis MIS and VPress web to print tools.

The training has begun with a full roll out anticipated for October when the different factories across the business will, for the first time, be integrated under one production and management system. It has been working with Prinergy on Demand, the cloud hosted version of the long established workflow which uses rules based automation to relieve the burden of processing jobs manually. Modern Litho has been a Prinergy user for around 20 years, so understands the RBA ethos that it embraces.

“We have been automating processes through Kodak for many years,” says VP operations Jim Tomblinson. “Human nature is to stay with what we have, but we’re looking to the future and to grow and to make ourselves better. I have spoken with Kodak over the years about extending the Prinergy workflow concept into MIS and to be able to communicate across all process steps, rather than repeat data entry at each step as we do today. 

“We wanted to know why we have to pick up jobs from prepress and repeat the data entry two or three times for each job. I explained this to Todd Biggar at a Kodak Graphic Users Association meeting, and asked why we couldn’t communicate and link to other systems.

“Then, a couple of months later I took a call from Todd, saying ‘I have an idea’.”

Modern Litho is reckoned to be in the top 1% of US printers. It operates what Tomblinson calls a hub and spoke model, where the main factory is the production hub completing work sent in from other offices in the network.

“This is great, until someone cuts a wire 100 miles away. Then it becomes apparent that hub and spoke is not the greatest idea,” he says. A workflow based in the cloud eliminating those direct connections would be only the first step. “But I couldn’t see how Kodak would be able to take us into the cloud,” he says.

What changed was the integration with Microsoft’s Azur cloud platform and the high levels of security this guarantees to users. “Microsoft simply changed the game,” Tomblinson says. “Microsoft becomes the guard on the door, protecting our data and our customer’s data and it can integrate with other partners if we choose, thanks to the open architecture approach. I could not be more excited.”

Now Modern Litho is looking forwards to a single database and single user interface in a workflow and MIS that is hosted in the cloud, accessible from anywhere that has a web connection and browser. 

During the test phase for Prinergy on Demand, Modern Litho was using a 100Mb connection to access the cloud. That is now two 1Gb connections and any latency issues have disappeared. The company sends 1 bit Tifs to the plate­setters as quickly as it did with an onsite physical ethernet network and servers. “I can send a large plate file and it doesn’t take any longer from an on location server. Once the first file has been processed, the second is already there and waiting for imaging,” he says.

The willingness of the partners involved to work with each other and so accommodate Modern Litho’s needs is, Tomblinson adds, a refreshing change from attitudes shown by its legacy MIS provider. “I had tried to get that supplier to join in the effort to create something that nobody else had done. But I could never get them to embrace it or to take our ideas seriously enough,” he says.

As a consequence that supplier has been ousted and VPress will take over the browser interfaces used to connect with customers and its online storefronts.

The new system will also gather data from across the process equipment that Modern Litho has, including its Heidelberg presses. Modern Litho can supply CIP3 data to the presses, but it is not using Prinect, instead it will fit autocount systems to the presses to feed running, makeready and press status data back into the workflow. The software can then make any adjustments to scheduling that might be necessary without involving estimators, production staff or account handlers. 

Under most workflows, client alterations or late breaking changes can mean a return to the estimating step to open the job again and assign it to a different production path if necessary. That comes to an end in the new system. The job is automatically reconfigured to cope with any change and alterations to estimates fed back to the MIS. 

“We can monitor and schedule jobs in the MIS and we will know where we are and where the jobs are. And we’ll be able to change that job without going back to the estimating stage,” says Tomblinson. “We will be able to look in the job bucket in detail at any time. This is a big, big deal for us.”

Those advantages start at the beginning of a job. “As an estimator you rarely get to see the job you are estimating on. You do now. We didn’t previously know our ink coverage figures in litho. We do now.

“Previously the estimator would run the calculations according to specifications provided. When the job arrives, the scheduler picks it up and changes what the estimator has worked out deciding how it should be laid out. This happens again at prepress, so each job is touched at least three times, at least for litho, and can be changed each time. And this has been going on for many, many years and we could never find a solution before now. With Kodak we now have the opportunity of eradicating and fixing those issues.”

The digital workflows are slightly different and web to print are different again as the job details are entered by the customer and nothing needs to be touched until paper or a plate is output.

“We are eliminating touches and errors and thanks to the data will be able to see just how productive our teams are. And there’s real opportunity from using the automation in the system. 

“People have been afraid of automation, especially in prepress where they think they might lose their jobs. But we are really doing is securing the bottom line so that the business can have room to grow. Thanks to automation people will have more time to do something else or else to do a more thorough job. It’s not about replacing jobs. When we switched from Kodak’s Trillium plate to Sonora, we had no need of someone to clean out the processor. That person is now processing incoming files.”

The data that the MIS will spit out in real time rather than ten days after the end of the month, will be both overwhelming and useful to running the business thanks to the visibility the digital flow provides. Modern Litho will be able to monitor jobs as they go through, will be able to see how teams perform, whether work from home is viable, for example.

Sales staff will gain a single view over each customer with details of previous jobs all visible at the same time as contact details, invoice and payment history and more. This sort of information has been available previously, but not in a single interconnected system that has access to every data point across the business.

“It was difficult before to get any kind of visibility,” Tomblinson says.

One advantage comes from being able to calculate with accuracy the amount of ink needed on a job. It will end the practice of over ordering a PMS colour ‘just in case’, he explains. This could amount to a substantial saving as excess ink is stored before being thrown away a year later. As Modern Litho has recently acquired a print company with a half web and a UV press, this becomes even more useful, as the more expensive UV ink also has a shorter shelf life before it is no good and has to be thrown away.

Other benefits will also accrue as the business lives up to the Modern Litho name. Says Tomblinson: “This is our future and it’s going to work.”