Company: Business Week
Industry: Publishing
Pragmatix Provides Reliable and Scalable Print Order Process
Business Week is the most-read source of global business news and is McGraw-Hill's flagship
publication under its Information and Media Group. With more than 8 million readers each
week, including online and television viewers, it is the world's most widely read business magazine.
Business Issue
- Create an efficient system to gather and compile information from multiple sources
- Improve and ensure the flow of information
- Deploy a reliable web-based solution
- Integrate new technology into a semi-manual work flow
Business Results
- Reduced postage and labor costs
- Supports fluctuating data demand
- Improved work flow efficiencies
- Reduced average processing time from 20 minutes to less than 5
Business Week delivers content to a worldwide audience in whatever format best fits their
needs. But, gathering and compiling the data required to produce the print run of Business Week
is enormous. Each week, it turned into a last-minute rush of phone, email and fax requests with
the potential for costly clerical and processing errors. The system, sadly outdated, also
required manual intervention throughout the entire process. To complicate matters, newsstand
and special copy requests were also manually processed and individually mailed as postage and
special-handling costs escalated. The entire process was time consuming and expensive, resulting
in poor recordkeeping and frustration on the part of Business Week's customers.
Pragmatix designed, developed and deployed a web-based system to manage the entire print order
process. The system receives inputs from managers world-wide, electronic feeds from internal systems
and file uploads from external vendors. The solution successfully improved the flow of information to
fulfillment service bureaus and printers saving time and money. Print orders are sent to production
plants and non-subscriber labels while electronic files are sent to those plants to be merged into
the print run. The system collects requestor name, version and quantity, charge-back account
information, one-time and repeating special requests in addition to recipient and shipping details.
The print order management solution now delivers an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the weekly print
order. It provides a total number of copies to the manufacturing department and relevant print
facilities, recipient information to service bureau/distribution coordinator, charge back information
to the finance department, alerts for relevant users to input timely data. In addition, the application
provides customized reports for all authorized users.
“Pragmatix was quickly able to understand
and improve our Print Order process. The Pragmatix solution
allowed us to cut our staff by one person, along with reducing
the work load 20% by creating enormous efficiency, and eliminating
the bottlenecks and weekly “scrambles” we used
to encounter. In addition, we uncovered additional savings
within the company.”
Thomas Masterson, VP Worldwide Circulation Director,
BusinessWeek
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