The following testimonial is based on the first generation photo scanning system from Kodak. The KODAK Picture Saver Scanning System is the second generation and affords these benefits as well as an expanded portfolio that includes the PS410 (direct replacement for the s1220) as well as the enhanced productivity afforded by the PS810.
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Gilbert MacIntyre & Son Funeral Home streamlines DVD production, wows clients, improves professional image
Darlene Henley, Funeral Director Assistant |
Peter MacIntyre and his colleagues at Gilbert MacIntyre & Son Funeral Home – in Guelph, Ontario, Canada – had a love-hate relationship with keepsake DVD presentations. On the one hand, they loved giving clients the customized lifetime tributes. “Keepsake DVDs mean the world to people,” says MacIntyre. “They’re very important to many of our clients.”
On the other hand, the process of scanning huge batches of photos on a flatbed scanner for the DVDs was tedious, time consuming, and redundant—and as a result, DVDs weren’t a cost-effective source of revenue for the funeral home.
Scan, crop, click, save, undo: repeat for hours
Before purchasing the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System, Gilbert MacIntyre & Son Funeral Home employees endured a tiring process each time they created a DVD presentation.
“It wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming,” Peter MacIntyre remembers. “First, we loaded as many pictures as we could on our flatbed scanner. Sometimes we could fit up to eight pictures— but when a client gives you 200 photos, eight is not a lot.”
It took a MacIntyre operator many hours to then crop each photo out of the single multi-image file created.
Scanning photos consumed 80% of the entire time it took to create each DVD. The rest of the process was efficient: saving the digital images to a folder on the desktop, and putting them through a DVD software program.
So MacIntyre started thinking that if the funeral home had a quicker way to scan photos, they could create DVDs in less than a quarter of the time.
SITUATION
The staff members of Gilbert MacIntyre & Son Funeral Home hesitated to promote keepsake DVDs to their clients, because of the tedious, time-consuming process of scanning the photos with a flatbed scanner. | OBJECTIVE
Purchase a scanner capable of quickly scanning many pictures—even fragile photos — to make it less labor intensive and more cost-effective to create keepsake DVDs. Improve the image quality of scans and increase sales of DVDs. | SOLUTION
KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System, KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System Software | COMMENTS
“You could call it the ‘Funeral Home Scanner,’ because it’s a great fit for us and makes sense for everyone in the industry. I’d believe it if you told me the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System was designed specifically for funeral homes.”
—Peter MacIntyre, Manager |
From four hours to 25 minutes per DVD
Coincidentally, Gerson Vijayan, Green Environment & Business Optimization Consultant at Paramount Document Solutions Inc., an authorized KODAK Reseller, called MacIntyre to set up an appointment to show him the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System.
“We were sold as soon as Gerson played the demo. My brother, Mike MacIntyre, looked at me and said, ‘Should we buy two?’” laughs Peter MacIntyre.
With the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System, the employees at Gilbert MacIntyre & Son simply grab a stack of photos, load them in to the scanner’s feeder, and click the “batch scan” button on the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning Software. The auto rotate feature eliminates the task of having to manually rotate each picture, saving valuable time.
MacIntyre claims, “What used to be a fourhour process is now a 25-minute job. We’ve gone from having to offer keepsake DVDs to actually promoting DVDs.”
“KODAK makes us look amazing”
- Better image quality. MacIntyre says the pictures in his DVD presentations look better now that he is using the new scanner. The overall image quality is higher, and the self-crop feature takes the scan edge-to-edge so there are no more “sloppy crop jobs”—as he calls them.
- More pictures per presentation. The funeral home used to limit customers to 50 photos per DVD, because it took so long to scan the pictures. “However, people often brought in hundreds of pictures. The funeral home would accept them of course, and wouldn’t charge more, but it created a lot of work. Now they tell clients that they can provide as many pictures as they wish.
- Photos quickly returned. Now MacIntyre and his team can return clients’ pictures immediately. Before, families had to wait a day for photo scanning. Sometimes family members became upset, because they wanted to use the pictures to create collages and displays for calling hours. But now, most customers just wait while the photos are scanned.
He sums it up this way: “This machine from Kodak makes us look better. We can give each family a high-quality product, with a quick turnaround for a reasonable price. Simply put – families are amazed.”
Fast ROI today, more opportunities tomorrow
When you create 450 arrangements each year, and scan 2,500 images each month, the time- and cost-savings add up quickly: MacIntyre calculates the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System paid for itself after just 15 presentations—or 6.25 versus 60 man hours.
And he’s already making plans to use the scanner in the future to scan boxes of files and documents going back to when Gilbert MacIntyre & Son opened in 1933. This is important work that needs to be done, because the funeral home often receives calls from people wanting to learn where an ancestor was buried, for example.
MacIntyre sites this as another example of the scanner’s practical use for funeral homes. “You could call it the ‘Funeral Home Scanner’ because it’s a great fit for us and makes sense for everyone in the industry. I’d believe it if you told me the KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System was designed specifically for funeral homes.”
 | KODAK Picture Saver Scanner System
(Current model, replacing the previous
KODAK s1220 Photo Scanning System) |