Sharp Photo runs a reliable lab with dakis

Where they started

Sharp Photo came to dakis when digital was taking over photography. The lab's business was making prints, and getting a digital image onto paper meant putting software in front of the customer that they could work out for themselves. Kiosks came first. The standard Bill set was simple: hand it to the least technical person you can find and see whether they get through it without help.

dakis met that standard, and Sharp has built on it ever since.

"The ease of use is really what drives people back to the site."

Bringing it together

Sharp Photo came to dakis when digital was taking over photography. The lab's business was making prints, and getting a digital image onto paper meant putting software in front of the customer that they could work out for themselves. Kiosks came first. The standard Bill set was simple: hand it to the least technical person you can find and see whether they get through it without help.

dakis met that standard, and Sharp has built on it ever since.

"It's one of the easiest back-end workflows that I've seen."

Key results

The result Bill values most is one he rarely has to think about. Downtime has been rare enough that reliability has dropped off his list of concerns, even as he hears about outages on other systems across the industry.

"It's actually not even on my radar anymore."

That dependability compounds. Staff spend their time producing orders rather than walking customers through software, and jobs move to the right machine without anyone sorting them. For a small team running a busy lab, that is time kept on the work. 
Bill's assessment is direct:

"It's efficient on the back end, it saves you labor, and the customer likes to use the software. I think it's the best thing out there."

Sharp Photo's focus now is film developing, a category that has made a strong come back across the industry. Bill wants that side as easy to order and produce as everything else. He is working with the dakis team on carrying it end to end: the order arriving, the film matched to it, and the scans going back to the customer through a gallery where they can order prints and photo books from the same images.

The throughline is the one that has held for twenty years: keep it easy for the customer, keep it dependable for the lab. dakis is the platform Sharp keeps building that on.