Taylor Bloxham 1st to use JDF - 05/05/2004 - Tharstern Limited

05/05/2004 Taylor Bloxham 1st to use JDF

Taylor Bloxham of Leicester has become the first site in the UK to utilise JDF integration between its Tharstern MIS and Creo Synapse UpFront in a truly commercial environment.

Taylor Bloxham is an innovative, customer-driven print media company, incorporating digital technology and communications and specialist print finishing operations. They have been providing top quality printed products since 1938. Today, with 180 staff and a turnover of £19m, the company continues to go from strength to strength.

“We are committed to continuous improvements and investment in technology and people to ensure we stay at the forefront of the print industry and ahead of our competitors.” says Matthew Wennington, IT Director of Taylor Bloxham. “We have had the Tharstern MIS system for over 4 years now, helping us to meet customer needs and demands. Having e-commerce modules like Customer Online has played an influential role in securing attractive new business contracts.”

“As we have grown the software has grown with us,” says Wennington. “We are now happy to be one of the first customers to actively enjoy vendor integration via JDF. From our perspective, JDF offers distinct advantages by increasing automation and eliminating many manual tasks and processes. Having a universal means to communicate job details allows the entire process - from the moment a customer asks for a quote or makes an order, right through to the delivery and invoicing - to be included in the workflow.”

“Eventually we will only have to key information in once at the very beginning, removing duplication and room for error and allowing better visibility into job progress. We are already starting to experience an element of this through the Tharstern JDF Workflow Connector and Synapse UpFront, using JDF.

Synapse UpFront has proven to be a great tool for production planning, allowing Taylor Bloxham to further automate their workflow. The pre-press department has recently cooperated in the beta testing of Synapse UpFront 3.0, one of three UK users to do so, and found the enhanced JDF and JMF capabilities helped their integration with Tharstern SQL 2.0 and gives them the potential to make further integration with cutting and binding downstream. “We are especially pleased to see such a clean and easy integration between the new version of UpFront and Tharstern’s latest MIS” said Alan Dixon, Technical Director at Positive Focus, distributor of UpFront, who supplied Taylor Bloxham. “ We have worked closely with Tharstern for a couple of years, since IPEX when UpFront was first shown importing basic job bag information from MIS, and the credit goes to their team for delivering a first for the industry.”

UpFront uses the product intent to help determine the production process by detailing the folding and stitching schemes. Previously, this type of decision making relied upon an experienced production planner. Now the Tharstern MIS system delivers the job to Synapse UpFront via JDF, and, using the database of printing and finishing plans, it will assess the optimum way to produce the job based on previous methods used. It assures a viable job with a minimal amount of operator involvement.