When South Downs printer Elephant Print And Display needed to progress from its accounts package to a real management information system, it found the Tharstern PRIMO Lite small business MIS matched its current and future requirements.

After being made redundant in 2002, Jason Gadd and Jamie Benson decided to go into business for themselves, setting up Elephant Print and Display. Running the business from a refurbished building in a stunning location in Barcombe, a few miles from Lewes in the South Downs, they have over the last ten years built a successful business. They offer large format, short run digital printing with in-house finishing capabilities to a varied customer base across the country, including trade, design agencies and print management companies.

Their small but experienced team of six employees deliver a quality service focusing on a high level of customer satisfaction. The company is on track to achieve around £450,000 in sales this year.

With a focus on quality and speed the pair invested in a HP Indigo 3050 digital colour press and HP Designjet 5000 large format thermal inkjets for their production environment. A high percentage of finishing, such as booklet making, perfect binding and wire-o binding is kept in-house. As with many small companies in the early days, business administration was run through an accounts package and a mixture of manual processes and FileMaker databases.

‘A couple of years ago we looked at how the company was operating to identify where the business would fail as our workload grew,’ says Mr Gadd. At first we thought it would lie in finishing but in fact we discovered it would be in the business administration process. So we made the decision to invest in an industry standard management information system (MIS) and after reviewing the market we chose Tharstern’s PRIMO Lite, as it provided all the functionality we needed.’

PRIMO Lite is intended for small sized printing organisations looking for an MIS that both provides the core functionality needed to run a small busy print business and is flexible, easy to use and affordable.

This system is designed to streamline a printer’s workflow, reduce administration time, and identify key performance indicators unique to printers enabling them to make informed decisions regarding their business. As standard it comes with three concurrent user licences, with the option to increase this to five.

It is an all in one package complete with estimating, job costing, outwork management, job bag creation, delivery notes, box labels, purchase order processing, sales and purchase invoicing with full integration to Sage Accounts. It is designed to streamline and automate essential steps in a job life cycle, reducing duplication and errors as well as freeing up employees’ time.

Sage integration

At the top of Elephant Print and Display’s wish list when looking for a solution was integration to Sage accounting. ‘From quoting and order processing, to despatch and invoicing, each job is run through PRIMO Lite so all the relevant information is available in real time. This means we can invoice each day rather than spending weekends manually re-keying information into the accounts package to get invoices out of the door,’ Mr Gadd explains.

‘All our bookkeeping is handled by our accountants, who have remote access to Sage, which through the seamless link to Tharstern MIS is always up to date. This is vital as they manage credit control so the efficiencies gained across the company has been quite substantial.’

Another reason to invest in an MIS was driven by the need to speed up response rates to customers. ‘PRIMO Lite has allowed us to compete,’ Mr Gadd continues. ‘We needed to be able to respond and turn around jobs quickly, as speed is a big part of being competitive today.’

Through using estimating templates in the MIS, Elephant Print and Display can now turn a high percentage of requests for quotes around within the hour and as a result is experiencing a higher win rate. It ensures that the estimates are always consistent and accurate and can quickly be analysed so profits can clearly be identified.

Elephant finds the estimating interface easy to use and intuitive. It has been engineered to build every aspect of an estimate quickly, simply and with precision, with the data
available to be re-used throughout the job’s life, without having to be re-entered.

Time savings
PRIMO Lite has also streamlined the job creation process, reducing the time it takes to provide the rest of the team with all the job information they need to get the work into production. Before adopting the MIS there was a lot of rekeying of information and
manual job bags to be created.

Now when an order is received everything is automated, with all the relevant information from the estimate creating the job so nothing holds up production. Having up to date job information that can be easily accessed by all employees within the company is vital in achieving the high customer satisfaction level Elephant Print and Display aims for. ‘Everyone can easily see the real time status of work that is currently in production, including any relevant notes about a job, in addition to a paper based job bag generated by the MIS. We filter the screens so each employee can quickly access the information they need to get jobs quickly through production, again answering the speed issue,’ Mr Gadd explains.

‘I thought that with the advent of faster communication such as quicker broadband speeds we would have more time to manage work, but it has had the opposite effect. Customers just expect things to be done faster, so we have to react accor­dingly.’
Tharstern has over 7000 users worldwide across its product portfolio, with more than 100 small litho and/or digital print companies using the PRIMO Lite version.

This experience in the industry was particularly important to Elephant Print and Display when deciding on an MIS vendor. ‘Reliability was a big factor in our choice as it is with all our main suppliers,’ says Mr Gadd. ‘We have to know that our suppliers are there for us when we need them. If we have trouble with stock we call our supplier and we know they will sort it for us. We have the comfort of an HP support contract for our output devices. We wanted the same level of comfort from our MIS supplier. Tharstern’s support has been very good – the level of knowledge within its team is excellent.’

Implementation

The PRIMO Lite system was implemented at the same time as adopting Sage. This was intense work, but the level of experience of Tharstern’s trainer meant that it was only a
matter of days before the system was up and running. Within a month the company was seeing value from the new business workflow, and it was realising a return on investment after around six months.

‘We went the budget route to start with by not implementing a standard MIS, which was a false economy really,’ Mr Gadd explains. ‘PRIMO Lite is certainly value for money, even though we are not currently using all the functionality it offers. We are looking to get more and more out of the system by investing in some additional training.
‘As the company grows and we need additional functionality from an MIS we can look at upgrading to Tharstern’s full-scale PRIMO MIS, without the need to start from scratch. This was also very important to us during the selection process.’

Elephant Print and Display is now looking to invest further in the business, with latex inkjet large format printers designed for soft signage textiles and a web to print system at the top of its shopping list.

‘The ability to offer a good mixture of products and services is important to us while keeping the culture of the business strong,’ Mr Gadd stresses. ‘We want to be a company that people can trust and rely on. Having PRIMO Lite will allow us to grow the company
without the business administration causing us to fail.’ 

Contact: www.tharstern.com