Peczuh chooses Tharstern MIS

The company has four manufacturing facilities – three in Utah, one in Colorado – from where it operates as a full-service print supplier, offering offset, digital, wide format and flexo printing, as well as full bindery capability. A family-owned business, Peczuh (pronounced PeeZee) has been in business for 54 years and employees around 120 people.

Jay Harris, chief operations officer and VP of manufacturing at Peczuh, explained what the company was looking for: ‘One of the most difficult challenges we have as a company is that we are spread out over 300 miles with these four sites. We wanted visibility across all the buildings so we could see scheduling and planning better.’

While each production manager would have control over their own facility’s schedule, everyone would have a clearer picture of the company-wide situation, he added.

Peczuh Printing installed Tharstern MIS and was impressed with the detailed implementation plan that Tharstern brought to the table, with implementation starting in September 2016.

The Tharstern MIS is due to go live in late-February at Peczuh, and already Harris has been excited by the potential impact of the software. He continued: ‘As we are building up the Tharstern system, we are seeing that it will give us a much simpler path to better utilize our equipment across our facilities. If I need to move a job to another site because that’s where the free resource is, it’s very simple to do and it improves inventory control across the four sites.’

Harris reported that the implementation has gone ‘extraordinarily well,’ given the magnitude of the project: such MIS implementations can take as long as 18 months to complete. Peczuh is implementing a complete suite of Tharstern modules, with the exception of the JDF module, which may be added at a later date when the company has more experience using the system. It will also have a better idea of areas that will benefit from automation at that point.

‘Ultimately, the goal is creating higher levels of efficiency, because that’s how you get more profitable these days,’ he said. ‘We will be able to gather data that enables us to better manage our business, understand our inventory and understand how long it takes us to actually complete certain projects, compared to how long we’ve been thinking it takes. It will help us understand our business better so we can run it more efficiently.’