Reading-based Herald Chase, which was previously running TharsternSQL v3, said the upgrade would help cope with an anticipated increase in the volume of business at the marketing communications printer.

Joint managing director Chris Goslar said: "On a typical day we handle 100 plus jobs and have always found Tharstern to be a reliable system that makes the day-to-day lives of our staff easier.

"After seeing the new interface and enhancements featured in Primo, along with the reporting and dashboards, we felt that upgrading to the latest version offered more flexibility and would give us a greater real-time insight into the performance of our business."

It was Goslar's fellow joint managing director Nigel Elkes who first noticed the advantages to be gained from adding production scheduling and shop-floor data capture modules to the firm's previous version.

"We have considered scheduling before but when we saw a preview of Primo and the enhanced production capabilities at Ipex we felt it would work perfectly for us, giving us the tools to electronically plan and see production, optimise capacity and fluidly respond to changing priorities," said Elkes.

In addition to the software upgrade, Herald Chase invested in an additional training programme to refresh its system setup and has worked with its staff to improve their knowledge of the MIS, allowing them to get more out of it.