Home shopping firm Express Gifts, a specialist in greetings cards, gifts, and home and garden items that distributes more than 3m catalogues every year, has installed OpForma at its product personalisation and distribution facility in Accrington, Lancashire.

Prolatus UK managing director Tony Talbot said he was "delighted" that Express Gifts, which is part of publishing and logistics group Findel and also has a call centre in Clayton le Moors, had installed OpForma.

He estimated that the 35,000 installation would allow Express Gifts' 60-strong production team to save around 4,000 man-hours each year, and said that a roll-out to the Clayton le Moors facility was planned for the near future.

Minneapolis-based Prolatus launched OpForma in March after a major international print group asked it to develop a cross-platform business reporting package.

Through an engine known as Extract, Transform and Load (ETL), XML-based OpForma scans a firm's network to automatically collect information from RIPs, file transfer software, digital asset management (DAM) systems and production workflows.

It then reports on and analyses the progress of jobs, as well as providing information on the efficiency of a firm's processes, such as utilisation of staff and technology.

OpForma's third function is to notify specific users of events in a job's progress.