Chicoine Group

Known for their high-quality print and color reproduction at competitive pricing, the family-owned Chicoine Group has a loyal customer base in eastern Canada and surrounding areas. Always looking for ways to improve their customers' experience, they implemented a cloud-based Kodak technology solution that has helped them speed up prepress workflow while maintaining impeccable quality.

With many loyal customers who have grown with them since the start of the business, Chicoine Group constantly seeks new ways to keep delivering high-quality print, quickly and competitively priced. They're also conscious of their business's environmental footprint and working to reduce it. The pandemic brought new challenges, with a need for remote access to ensure uninterrupted service to their customers. The company sought a reliable technology solution that could be up and running quickly, with flexibility to accommodate their many different job types and sizes. A cloud-based solution from Kodak offered the chance to improve speed, efficiency, and customer collaboration.

Thanks to the cloud architecture of the KODAK PRINERGY Platform, Chicoine Group's new solution was able to be installed entirely remotely, so pandemic restrictions posed no problems. They were quickly operational with a new suite of software tools that provided remote access to both staff and customers. They chose KODAK INSITE Prepress Portal so customers could submit jobs and then view, modify, and approve files all online, at any time, expediting the approval process. KODAK COLORFLOW Pro Software streamlines color normalization for the company's G7 certification, ensuring consistent quality regardless of ink, substrate, or equipment used. It also optimizes their ink usage to reduce waste and environmental impact. KODAK PRINERY Workflow Software ties together Chicoine Group's entire prepress operation, adding automation at every step to reduce risk of errors and dramatically speed up their workflow.

Getting the KODAK PRINERGY solution up and running during the pandemic helped Chicoine Group meet a big challenge: printing and distributing 4 million copies of the Québec government's COVID-19 "Self-Care Guide" under a tight deadline—a feat only possible with the added speed and efficiency of the new workflow automation. Those gains have allowed them to increase work volumes while maintaining quality and price for their customers, creating opportunities to expand to new services, such as direct distribution from their printing plants. During the pandemic customers transitioned easily to using the INSITE Portal, and it is now an indispensable tool for fast, collaborative production. With an ongoing focus on strong customer partnerships and Kodak technology to support it, Chicoine Group has set themselves up to stay competitive for the long term.