Knight Abbey Printing and Direct Mail

A thriving family-owned print business for decades with rapid growth in the last 10 years, Knight Abbey Printing and Direct Mail knows the value of smart, targeted technology. Whether facing high-stakes customer challenges or even natural disasters, they've relied on Kodak software and services to see them through and keep them competitive.

Knight Abbey has always invested in technology to advance their business. They had used KODAK PRINERGY Workflow Software to manage prepress for years, and they had recently implemented the KODAK INSITE Prepress Portal when in 2005 Hurricane Katrina submerged their coastal Mississippi facility under eight feet of water. Despite losing all their physical infrastructure, customer and job files were preserved with the Kodak software, literally keeping the company in business. After that experience, Knight Abbey knew they could count on Kodak to tackle their latest challenge: improving workflow efficiency after recent rapid growth. Despite their technology and their talented people, at their new scale the company was no longer fast or responsive enough for client demands. Staff spent hours simply creating new jobs. Generating proofs could take days. When they realized they were at risk of losing a million-dollar client and other key accounts, Knight Abbey knew they needed more help.

The right technology tools were already in place at Knight Abbey; what they needed was the expertise of KODAK Professional Services to maximize that investment's potential. Kodak's specialists began by assessing the company's existing challenges and processes to determine where automation could streamline and expedite day-to-day operations. They then customized the Rules-Based Automation (RBA) feature of PRINERGY Workflow Software to those unique needs, dramatically speeding up tasks such as job creation, preflight checks, generating proofs in the INSITE portal, job retrieval for reprints, job archiving, and more. The KODAK Professional Services team also ensured optimal integration across all of Knight Abbey's technology, such as their print MIS.

The value of Knight Abbey's customized automation speaks for itself in hard numbers: the company estimates it saved more than $100,000 in their first year of working with KODAK Professional Services. Customer service reps reduced their weekly time on preflight tasks by 25-30% —time they could instead devote to client relationships. The prepress department shaved hours a day off job creation, and about 15% of all jobs in prepress became fully automated, with no staff involvement needed at all. Customers were thrilled that the INSITE Portal (PDF) now generated proofs for them in seconds rather than days. Knight Abbey has always considered customer service one of their most important competitive differentiators, and their Kodak partnership will continue supporting this goal well into the future.