KEE Consultants Joined RIT for Gravure Day 2011

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50 RIT undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, and invited guests participated at the March 31 Rochester Institute of Technology’s annual Gravure Day event.

Representatives of industry, academia and the international standards community met to discuss “What Drives Print Global?” at Rochester Institute of Technology’s annual Gravure Day event. Nearly 50 RIT undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members and invited guests participated in the March 31 event and learned how standards are helping print become a global industry.

KEE Consultants, an international standards consultant based in France, added a global perspective to the event. Elie Khoury, CEO of KEE Consultants and Alwan Color Expertise, has a long history of collaborating with and supporting RIT. Khoury gave a presentation, “ISO Standards and Print Globalization,” summarizing his nearly 15 years of experience implementing graphic arts standards. Khoury cited several examples of how embracing these standards led to superior results. At the national level, Khoury discussed how Germany had become the global leader in adopting graphic arts standards (with more than 400 printers being certified as ISO 12647-2 compliant).

According to Robert Chung, Gravure Research Professor in RIT’s School of Print Media, the knockout punch in Khoury’s presentation was the revelation that the German printing industry has gained market share by leveraging competitiveness. In a European market in which local printers in many developed countries are losing market share due to globalization, the German printing industry has gained market share by leveraging standards to produce high quality products at competitive prices.

“Mr. Khoury’s international perspective has been tremendously valuable to RIT as we keep our fingers on the pulse of the global printing industry,” says Chung. “The theme of his presentation, international printing standards help align quality expectations and reduce waste in the supply chain, is one that we strongly endorse. The more geographically distributed a company is, the more compelling the benefits of international printing standards become.”

About KEE Consultants

KEE Consultants is an international network of leading graphic arts industry consultants and experts founded by Elie Khoury, an internationally recognized French expert with more than 12 years of experience in implementing ISO standards in the graphic arts industry. KEE Consultants’ objectives are to promote and contribute to the development and implementation of graphic arts standards. In addition, KEE consultants is a global reference platform and resource center for consultancy, training and services.

The latest KEE Consultants’ initiative, an Internet-based Gap Analysis Audit (GAA), was launched in September 2010. To date, more than 50 companies from Europe, North America and Asia have registered for this audit, validating the worldwide need for such an assessment service.

Printers registering for KEE’s GAA receive a questionnaire, guidelines and testforms to be processed, proofed and printed using the printer’s production workflow and equipment. The resulting output files and prints are then sent to KEE Consultants for assessment.

In return, the printer receives a comprehensive report including measurements, conformance assessments and recommendations. With these results in hand, the printer can implement improvements internally or with the help of an external consultant of his choice in order to be prepared and ready for BVDM’s Process Standard Offset (PSO) or RIT’s Printing Standards Audit (PSA) certification.

For more information, go to the Alwan Color Expertise website.

About RIT

Rochester Institute of Technology is internationally recognized for academic leadership in computing, engineering, imaging technology, sustainability, and fine and applied arts, in addition to unparalleled support services for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. RIT enrolls 17,000 full- and part-time students in more than 200 career-oriented and professional programs, and its cooperative education program is one of the oldest and largest in the nation.

For two decades, U.S. News & World Report has ranked RIT among the nation’s leading comprehensive universities. RIT is featured in The Princeton Review’s 2011 edition of The Best 373 Colleges as well as its Guide to 286 Green Colleges. The Fiske Guide to Colleges 2011 includes RIT among more than 300 of the country’s most interesting colleges and universities.