‘We plugged them in, turned them on, installed the drivers and we were off,’ said Tectonics Vice President and General Manager Steve Grundner. ‘We’ve been an EFI partner for a long time, and also an HP partner, and then with the introduction of Durst to our platform, there were some concerns with implementation around the RIP. But Durst had validated Caldera early on, and we trusted that Caldera would work. And it did, we have no issues with the RIP software.’

Tectonics has been using Caldera Software for five years, particularly in the print on demand sector, for both B2B2C and B2C customers. ‘There’s a great story behind Tectonics that continues today,’ said Grundner. ‘We are differentiated from our competitors in that we’re heavily focused on technology adoption and implementation, automation, lean manufacturing, and software development. Printing has obviously been digital for a long time but harnessing that digitisation and employing its virtues within our digital operational workflows is key. We operate an automated manufacturing ecosystem that is driven by automation and unique, cohesive software systems. Caldera is an integral component of this software ecosystem that we rely on pretty heavily. We’re machine agnostic and we’ve been print partners to most major print OEMs for a long time, so we need to have software that lets us work across different platforms, business models and operational workflows.’

E-commerce print workflows are different to large project-driven live event workflows, but Caldera software allows the Tectonics print operation to handle both. According to Grundner, ‘Quality is a goal and requirement of ours when it comes to technology adoption. Regarding the finished product on the print side, colour and repeatability are paramount, and this is where Caldera comes in. Although Caldera is performing well, we are always looking to extract the most benefit from the software, so it’s a work in progress, and as we add new products and new customers, the software is growing with us.’

Tectonics needs software which will perform in critical areas: speed, quality and user experience are key. Other software they tried in the past proved to be less than ideal. ‘Additionally, the colour management we get from Caldera software is superb,’ Grundner added. ‘So, it scores for usability and quality. Speed is important, and the combination of the software and hardware works, Caldera fits well into our diverse ecosystem of hardware. With e-commerce, demand is not deterministic and varies widely day-to-day and across seasons. Our software must be flexible enough to deal with that and do it seamlessly It works well and doesn’t give us any issues. This is why we’re partnered with Caldera, and what led us down the path to implementation, to where we are today.’