People everywhere depend on printed packaging to make decisions about what products they will buy and how they will use them. Consumers also need the security that this packaging is printed with food-safe inks when it matters. They may not know it, but many of the packages consumers see every day are printed by equipment from the Eastman Kodak Company.
Ensuring Kodak’s legacy for future generations
“Kodak” has long been a household name. The Eastman Kodak Company empowers people and businesses everywhere to express themselves in images. Today, Kodak remains a company of innovation, focusing on commercial printing and advanced materials and chemicals.
While the company’s portfolio of offerings currently covers equipment, consumables and software for commercial print, and many kinds of film and brand licensing, the company takes special care to help its business-to-business (B2B) customers meet their unique printing needs.
After turning the cumbersome and complicated art of photography into a part of everyday life, Kodak continued to simplify commercial printing. For instance, Kodak’s innovative process-free printing plates eliminate the need for plate processors, effectively cutting an entire step from conventional printing methods and providing businesses with greater efficiency and potential savings.
The overall growth of the company’s portfolio and the shift to B2B commerce has helped Kodak remain a household name. The company continues to evolve to meet the quickly changing needs of its B2B customers with a range of innovations. Kodak’s chemical advances in the development of ink enable the company to produce water-based inks that are much more environmentally friendly than solvent inks. The company also sells inks that are rated as safe for food and personal care items, which is a must for many of Kodak’s customers.
Connecting customers with the brand they trust
Despite all these offerings, though, the company knew it needed to improve the online commerce experience for its B2B customers. In a recent Nation Media Soundscape, Jim Continenza, CEO at Kodak, admitted the company’s e-commerce experience was not as intuitive or easy to use as the products Kodak sells.
Just as Kodak greatly reduced the barrier to entry for people to take photos, the company needed to reduce the complexity of e-commerce for customers buying Kodak products to meet their unique business needs. For this, it began a digital transformation that will put customers at the center of the B2B e-commerce experience.
With the SAP Commerce Cloud solution, the company is rebuilding its front-end e-commerce and will enable businesses in more than 80 countries to quickly find and purchase the products they need through a single online shopping experience. The solution will provide Kodak with a range of intuitive tools for building a customer experience around the needs of the customer.
Empowering employees to build better experiences
Kodak has put another important group of people at the center of its experience – its employees. Customers aren’t the only ones who benefit from drag-and-drop experience-building capabilities for e-commerce. By centering the e-commerce experience around how easily employees could build and create better experiences for customers, the company also improved the employee experience.
Kodak will use Experience Management solutions from SAP and Qualtrics to find out how employees feel about the digital transformation – before, during, and after the company’s new SAP solutions go live.
With the unique combination of quantitative and qualitative data gathered by SAP solutions, the company will gain a realistic and actionable view of how employees feel about their experience. Based on that information, Kodak will be able to continue to update its SAP solutions to create an employee experience that makes work more satisfying and serving customers more efficient.
When the project is complete, employees will work on an IT foundation – built on SAP solutions – that helps them uphold and transform Kodak’s legacy for the modern business customer. Customers across the globe will have access to a new e-commerce experience for the products and services necessary to print the Kodak moments that keep their businesses moving.
To learn more about the role of SAP solutions in Kodak’s digital transformation, listen to a conversation with Jim Continenza in a National Public Media Soundscape.
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