DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY, June 5-Transcontinental O'Keefe Montreal produces 500 jobs per month, ranging from magazines and posters to hang tags for clothing. With a KODAK PRINERGY Workflow System as the backbone of its production workflow, Transcontinental O'Keefe is finding new ways to easily automate many workflow related tasks that are manual, including confirming orders, creating jobs, reviewing proofs and more.

"We use PRINERGY Software and do great imposition work with KODAK PREPS Software, but not too long ago we were still relying on paper, pencil, and a calculator for creating layouts," said Rob Lisi, Prepress Manager at Transcontinental. "The click of a wrong key would spell the difference between profit and loss on a job."

Additional software from Kodak helped Transcontinental implement end to end automation, from online job submission via KODAK INSITE Prepress Portal System to production planning with KODAK UPFRONT Production Planning Software and imposition, production, reporting and archiving with the PRINERGY Workflow System.

Lisi added, "Although implementing UPFRONT Software and the automation required people to change the way they work, our productivity had doubled within two months. Automation saved us 11 hours of labor per day and let us recover our investment in just under four and a half months." 

After six months, the results were in and Lisi could see that the automation program offered quantifiable results that would interest other Transcontinental facilities. Lisi organized a meeting of prepress managers in North America and presented them with the results of his program. Two sites have already followed Lisi's lead, and other sites are considering the program.