Dayfold has returned to Tharstern after a five-year hiatus with a different MIS provider.
The Dorst company is now running Tharstern’s Estimate Pro alongside Classic as the system beds in. It will become standard throughout the business, including for the acquisitions that the company has made.
Del Simmons, Dayfold’s managing director, says that the company had allowed the original Tharstern system to stagnate. “We were running Tharstern Classic, but were a long way behind in terms of upgrades,” he explains. This left an opportunity for a different supplier to promise a more effective solution, one that would retrieve data from its production equipment, deliver scheduling and imposition and generally deliver jobs through to production much faster.
Those promises he says were unfulfilled, until returning to Tharstern. Now it has the full layout library, runs IMP for imposition and can track jobs through the factory with data collection for further analysis. “They are the main drivers for us as a business,” Simmons says.
The company works on a project by project basis, jobs are rarely straightforward and will involve expensive papers, foiling, embossing and other value add finishing processes. “We are not about running the press as fast as possible, but at the right speed for the job,” he says.
Dayfold runs a four-colour Heidelberg CS92 LED UV and six-colour CD74. A job can start printing with white on a Colourplan sheet on the LED UV press and then go to the CD for fluorescent colours, he says. This is challenging for any MIS and defeated the system it selected five years ago.
As that failed to rise to the job, Dayfold looked around the market, including suppliers that had not been active five years ago, before returning to Tharstern. “We went through a process of looking at different MIS suppliers to see which one we liked best. We had lots of demos and spent a lot of time researching, but still felt Tharstern offered the best solution for now and for the future,” he says. “And we wanted to get the separate parts of the business on one system. Tharstern is well known in the industry and probably has the most integrations with Heidelberg and other suppliers.”
One of those is with Hubspot to manage customer communications that Dayfold is implementing and another with CarbonQuota to track the carbon generated by any job. This is on the radar as a growing number of customers are placing great store by sustainability.
Having come though Covid and the upheaval involved in the installation of the SRA1 Heidelberg, Dayfold is settling for a quieter period. Not entirely though. It has two HP Indigo 5500s that will need to be upgraded. Discussions are underway, says Simmons.
