Tharstern will begin the rollout of its Tharstern Cloud MIS in September and is looking to work with a number of label printers and other partners in the industry to refine the software as further modules are added over the following months.
Tharstern Cloud was introduced to customers and possible partners at an online launch last week. CEO Keith McMurtrie described it as a “new platform that offers unparalleled connectivity”. The company has invested just shy of £1.8 million over the three-year project to deliver a completely open MIS that makes full use of APIs, third party applications and which resides in the cloud for “world class security and almost unlimited scaleability”, according to McMurtrie.
Even before the launch event, feedback to the development has been positive enough for Tharstern to commit a further £452,000 to accelerate development and to double the size of the ten-strong development team.
The aim of the early adopter programme Tharstern wants to set up is to gain feedback to understand which way to progress the next phase of development. This could be what McMurtie calls “more vertical, to tackle wastage, more horizontal as we develop into more elements of production, or tangentially, which would be something slightly leftfield for a traditional MIS supplier”.
Already earmarked to be rolled out in the coming months are modules for orders, for shipping and for production. Each will configure the user interface slightly differently according to the requirements of each department and user. Thus a press operator will see only information that is relevant to the task in hand while the estimators and production manager will be able to interrogate the system according to the production capacity of each machine. Thus a job that demands spot colours will be directed to a flexo press, but by allowing combination colours from its high gamut digital press, the same job may take in digital printing at a different price point.
A choice of views will be possible, though the favourite is likely to be what Tharstern calls the kanban view, one which uses stacks of cards for individual jobs placed according to progress through the factory with flags to highlight those that need attention.
The CEO will also experience a different view over the system, featuring a dashboard showing the different KPIs that can be set up for a realtime view over the business. There is also access to the feedback from a well being feature. Employees will be asked how they feel that day or answer other questions that will enable the company to spot personnel issues in time to intervene and before they become problems. This is linked to a digital Noticeboard that Tharstern is making available as a free of charge version to enable it to be viewed by all members of staff or on screens around the business.
Pricing for the system itself has still to be settled, though will be on a pay per use and monthly fee basis. “Now we want to work with a spread of vendors,” says McMurtrie. “We are not arrogant enough to say that we have all the answers.”
