Eastman Kodak Company today announced that Arrow Imaging Limited, a Tamworth-based service bureau, has purchased three high performance i1860 production scanners to process an ever
increasing amount of client documentation and add capacity for future growth. Capturing up to 200 pages per minute1, the i1860s installed are the fastest production scanners ever made by Kodak.

Arrow Imaging specialises in offering a range of bespoke document management services from physical storage, document collection and disposal to higher value scanning, archiving, hosting and software solutions. An accredited Invu document management software partner providing sales, implementation and training services, it is British Standard ISO 14001/1996 and ISO 9001/2000 accredited2.

Founded in 1981, the company employs over 70 staff and has over 400 clients in numerous vertical markets where paper management is crucial such as aerospace, manufacturing, construction, energy, financial services and healthcare. Key customers include among others Dunlop, Bostik, George Wimpey, Balfour Beatty, Daimler Chrysler, Derbyshire Building Society, E.ON, West Midlands Ambulance Service and Seven Trent Laboratories.

Nick Hawkes, Arrow Imaging’s sales director, says “Our consultative approach to helping clients means that on average we retain customers for 12 years. Given this, along with 45 additional new business wins last year, turnover has increased year on year from £1.9 million in 2005 to £2.55m last financial year. This growth has driven the requirement to add additional scanning capacity to meet our day-to-day operational needs.”

The quantity of pages Arrow Imaging therefore scans per month has burgeoned, increasing from 3.5 million in September 2007 to 5 million today which equates to 238,000 per day. This
has driven the need for the Kodak i1860 scanners which were purchased direct from Kodak distributor, Avnet, in the second half of 2007 in a deal worth over £200,000. Deployment was staggered with one scanner installed in September, October and December respectively.

This is allowing Arrow Imaging to manage its additional workload without the need to recruit more staff, with the new units working alongside a number of Kodak 7520 scanners already in place.

Hawkes says, “We’ve always used Kodak’s equipment right back to the days of microfilm. With the addition of the i1860s to our fleet, we’re moving our existing i840
production scanner and a number of Kodak 5500 mid volume scanners to our disaster recovery site a few miles down the road in Fazeley to ensure business continuity should there be an issue at the main Tamworth centre.”

Over and above throughput speed, the new i1860s offer additional benefits to Arrow Imaging such as the ability to cope with a broader range of paper size and paper quality, from till receipts to A3 sized documents even in a high speed production environment.
With Kodak’s feature rich Capture Software, Arrow Imaging can scan into any format based on client need including TIFF, PDF, black and white, grayscale or colour.

In turn, Arrow Imaging can make scanned images available to clients through its online DocuNet portal – a web hosted solution offering customers 24/7 access to their information – or through individual CD-ROMs or a networked solution called CD Manager. Hawkes explains, “CD Manager is a software solution we’ve developed which allows a customer to load data from CD/DVDs onto their systems and make it available to all users over the corporate LAN. It’s a fantastic tool to enhance staff collaboration and access to the information we process on their behalf.”