Printing Securely with Solimar and Kyocera: National Exam Books

Testing is a big business. Schools at every academic level and professional certification programs spend countless hours and large budgets to ensure that test content is secure, that the proper student is taking the test, and that every step is auditable. Around the world, national tests are known for their security requirements, but those same requirements have traditionally put a burden on testing organizations.

Responding to a request for a proposal (RFP), the team at Kyocera Europe worked with their distributor in Slovenia and the team at Solimar to crack the code and provide an efficient, streamlined, and highly secure solution to meet the brief. As Jamie Walsh from Solimar Europe describes it, “We’ve got this amazing collaboration story about what happens when Solimar works with a great partner like Kyocera to create something unique but essential in the European market.”

As Walsh says, everyone in Europe has experience taking national exams, but few people know what goes into executing these important milestones in students’ lives. Solimar began working with Kyocera Europe some years ago, mainly supplying data transforms. This application, however, required a much deeper collaboration and the Solimar Chemistry platform, a comprehensive workflow automation solution.

As Deon Wepener of Kyocera tells the story, an existing customer produced national exam books using their toner equipment and an older software solution. They came to Kyocera looking for more speed and a more efficient workflow. The challenge they brought was to build a new workflow to do precisely what the older solution did. As the discussions continued, it was clear that the Solimar Chemistry platform could deliver much more than was needed, and the nature of the project expanded as the customer asked about more streamlining and consolidation of tasks, as well as additional security.

Wepener says, “It was quite an amazing journey working with the client. We kept adding all the little bits and pieces, and Solimar solved every time the user came up with another challenge quite easily. Our modular approach with Solimar provided the end solution to this customer.”

National Exam Books

National exam books require security sensitivity, such as election ballots and applications using personal health or financial data. Wepener says that every book must be unique. They use the MD5 secure hash algorithm paired with a cryptographic hash function. This combination ensures the encryption of transmitted data and enables verification of digital certificates, creating a robust security system for each exam book.

Adding to the complexity was the requirement to do a Unix time and date stamp, bring it in, and then encapsulate it within the complete document. Because of the security sensitivity required by the examination board, every book is uniquely identified as the original and only source PDF. Each page in the exam book is assigned a unique identifier that links it to its specific book. This means if a student removed a page from one book and attempted to use it in another, it would be immediately detectable, preventing potential cheating. Every book and page is coordinated and powered by Solimar’s Chemistry platform.

An important feature that Wepener notes is that you go back to the start with most workflow products. You look at how things are done today and the end point of what the customer would like to do. Often, the goalposts keep moving. With the Chemistry platform, Kyocera worked with the Solimar team to select the correct modules to meet the customer’s needs. Walsh says that working together, they built the application up from the original data files and the PDF documents and then took them through the various steps to demonstrate the proof of concept.

Solimar also creates JDF job tickets to help with the automation. Now, the job ticket is delivered to the Fiery front end on the Kyocera Taskalfa Pro, making it an application that any national testing board could use. As Wepener says, it’s very repeatable in the European market and anywhere.

Most impressively, the RFP tender was completed in under six weeks from start to proof of concept — a remarkably short timeframe for such a complex and secure solution. It is an end-to-end solution that begins with blank paper in and then colorful, unique exam papers out controlled by a JDF workflow.