Amersfoort, The Netherlands
Wilco
Future-proofing at Wilco with the first Kodak cloud-based print workflow solution in Europe
Company
End-to-end book and magazine printing and binding, founded in 1958 with 400+ employees serving European markets
Challenge
Implement workflow technology and server infrastructure that can grow and scale with the business
Kodak Solution
PRINERGY Platform
Introduction
With a fast-paced print business specializing in high-quality books and magazines for customers across Europe, Wilco has relied on Kodak's prepress and workflow technology for 20+ years. Their recent transition to the cloud-driven KODAK PRINERGY Platform brings even greater efficiencies, proactive security, and flexible scalability.
The Business Need
Kodak technology has long been a key to Wilco's success: using KODAK PRINERGY Workflow Software with its Rules-Based Automation (RBA) feature boosted efficiency and throughput to help the printer grow to more than 430 people across three locations in the Netherlands. The added speed and productivity from automation has been essential to their expansion into the wider European market. But that growth has tested the limits of Wilco's original IT architecture. Interdependent infrastructure meant that if a server at the Amersfoort headquarters went down, prepress at the other sites also ground to a halt. The hardware was showing its age, unable to keep up with the speed and data security demanded by an international customer base, plus sever maintenance ate up valuable staff time. Wilco needed a more powerful solution that would set them up for the future. With their longstanding confidence in Kodak's technology expertise, Wilco took our advice: move entirely to the cloud.
The Kodak Solution
In early 2020 Wilco became Kodak's first European customer for our KODAK PRINERGY Platform. Replacing their previous IT architecture of three on-premise workflow systems, they now have a single cloud-based system that powers production for all three sites. Technical issues at one facility have no affect on the others, so uptime is maximized. With no on-site servers to manage, Wilco staff are free to focus on the core business, while Kodak assumes all responsibility for system admin, monitoring, software upgrades, and any problem resolution. The PRINERGY Platform is backed by the highly secure network infrastructure of Microsoft Azure, providing the world's strongest data and anti-hacking protections. And Wilco no longer has to worry about outgrowing capacity of on-premise servers—their cloud solution can scale indefinitely as their business grows.
The Outcome
After implementing PRINERGY Workflow Software with RBA a few years back, Wilco soon saw productivity improve by about 50%— automation enabled them to dramatically increase output with the same number of employees. Switching their PRINERGY system to the cloud has opened up even more powerful automation options and brings other valuable tools such as automatic backup and archiving, disaster recovery, and insightful analytics. While they previously invested heavily in data security, they've now eliminated that expense and get far greater protection from the Microsoft-backed PRINERGY solution. And the scalability of the cloud system lets Wilco be more agile and responsive to changing conditions, easily upscaling or downscaling digital resources as needs change to optimize their cost efficiency. With Kodak and PRINERGY, Wilco is ready for whatever comes next.
Contact Us
Contact a Kodak representative to learn how our products and solutions can help grow your business.