Digital Print House's New MIS Increases Efficiency

One of Europe's largest digital output facility houses, Lorien Unique, has ordered Optimus 2020 management information systems (MIS) modules, following a detailed analysis of MIS technology.

One of Europe's largest digital output facility houses, Lorien Unique, has ordered Optimus 2020 management information systems (MIS) modules, following a detailed analysis of MIS technology.

Lorien Unique, which is based in Heathrow, Berkshire (UK) is the largest site of HP Indigo presses in Europe.

The company's quest began 18 months ago when it decided to increase the efficiency and capacity of its production equipment.

Lorien Unique's operations director, Matthew Diamond, explained: "We do not like to think of ourselves as printers.

Every single sheet printed at our site is personalised or customised and produced on our three 3050 or 3200 seven-colour HP Indigo presses.

Every year we send throughout Europe millions of direct mail items and every one is tailored to a specific individual.

To undertake the MIS project we formed a technical committee, which then contacted 10 MIS suppliers in the UK and asked them to tender.

After much evaluation we provided four companies with an identical brief and asked them to give us a presentation that matched our requirements." He continued: "The committee created an 80-point evaluation matrix that covered every aspect from technology and capability to the financial stability of the company and its ability to develop new systems in the future.

Optimus and its recently introduced Version 18 of Optimus 2020 came out well ahead." Stage one of Lorien Unique's order includes MIS modules such as estimating, job scheduling, data collection, invoicing and reporting.

Training will take place on them during August at Heathrow and at the Optimus training suite in Woking.

Further MIS modules, including importing from CRM packages, remote access and direct connectivity to the pre-production workflow, will be installed later in the year.

Diamond said: "One of the many benefits of the Optimus 2020 system is its flexibility.

We wanted an MIS product that would interface easily with existing software, such as our Sun accounting and CRM packages and the digital workflow utilised to drive the HP Indigo presses.

It was also important that the MIS system was fully JDF compatible and would allow us to take advantage of developments in JDF in years to come.

Optimus 2020 provides us with all of those elements and we're looking forward to implementing the system during the summer.".

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