Partnering for Our Industry's Future

Education is always an investment in the future. And as graphic arts students in the U.S. and around the world look to the future, Kodak is one company helping bring it to them today.

“Kodak has always believed in the educational process,” said Mike Bialko, worldwide product manager for packaging workflow. “It has always believed that educating the youth, the future graphic professionals of the world, is a key – not only for Kodak, but for the printing industry.”

Indeed, Kodak has a long history of sponsoring a variety of educational institutions, providing software, training, lectures, and equipment to build on that foundation. The company works closely with a number of schools worldwide, including California Polytechnic (Cal Poly) State University, Clemson University in South Carolina, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

“We strive to meet the needs of our educational institutions,” noted Bialko. “It is discussed every year and planned for.”

Packaging it for Cal Poly

For decades, Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, has used cutting-edge technology to prepare students for successful careers in a wide variety of graphic arts professions. The school, Bialko explained, “is really unique. They not only have a program for the graphic arts, but they actually have a student-run print shop. The Kodak workflow solutions are just now enabling them to do more automation, making them able to have students submit jobs via the Internet for processing. It has really just opened the doors for them.”

In working with Cal Poly, he recalled, “we on the packaging workflow side knew that they had mentioned their need for replacing their existing workflow software with something that was state of the art, so that their students would get the most real-world benefit from it.”

In discussions with school administrators, Bialko and his colleagues talked extensively about Prinergy and Insite, Kodak’s workflow software solution. The popular Prinergy workflow is a print-production hub that delivers intelligent prepress management tools for commercial and packaging print manufacturing. It features "intent-based automation," driving a higher level of accuracy and efficiency in the print production cycle, increasing quality control, reducing manual touch points and lowering the cost of production. The connectivity of the system increases efficiency and drives the costs out of every step of production, including pre-production, planning, production. and manufacturing.

In Prinergy Workflow, the job's intent is captured when the order enters the system. Whether it is received via Kodak Insite Prepress Portal, MIS, an online storefront, or manual entry, Prinergy Workflow uses the full description of the finished job -- including the breakdown of its parts -- to automate its planning, processing, and production. Downstream, it uses two-way communication to provide users, such as customer service representatives, with job and device status information at all times.

“We talked about what they could offer to Cal Poly, what it could do for them,” he remembered. The automation, color management, web portal solutions, and packaging offerings “really struck a chord with them. Everyone mutually agreed that it would be in the best interests of the students for Cal Poly and Kodak to install our software there.”

Thrilling Color Management

Cal Poly’s book, History of the Phototypesetting Era, which details advances in technology that had critical influence on the printing and publishing industries from 1945 to 1985, was created over 10 weeks, with students in the graphic communication program producing a high-quality, 380-page book with more than 300 color illustrations.

The publication was printed using a combination of offset lithography with Kodak Sonora Process Free Plates and digital printing processes. The difficulty of managing consistency between the two printing processes was overcome by using donated ColorFlow Software, which integrated within Prinergy Workflow.

Not surprisingly, the students at Cal Poly were “just thrilled,” Bialko related. “They were going from older workflows that were very archaic and very out of date. When we brought in Prinergy and Insite the students were thrilled -- and amazed at what workflow could do these days in terms of color management.”

Automation proved to be the biggest thing for them, he added. “It was a matter of how they could see real world automation in processing their jobs.”

Will the work with Cal Poly continue? “Absolutely,” Bialko confirmed. “I am in contact with them almost weekly, visiting, doing lectures, training, and supporting them however we can.”

For the new year, Kodak’s educational outreach promises to continue uninterrupted. “We are engaging more universities, not only in the United States but worldwide,” said Bialko, “offering lecturing, software, equipment, and training to support their curriculums.”

In short, Kodak is helping to bring the future of graphic communications to those who will one day live it.