PRAGMATIX : Pragmatix News

NEW YORK, NY - It was early 2001 and the height of the dotcom era. BusinessWeek magazine was arguably the most powerful of the business periodicals. It enthralled millions of business executive readers every week with tales of technology superstars, who were deploying the latest software to rewrite the very nature of business.

But while BusinessWeek writers were telling the world of the latest technological marvels, BusinessWeek production people were living a very different reality.

At BusinessWeek’s headquarters here, circulation was working with a 20-year-old production system, a system installed the same year MS-DOS was introduced. BW’s sales and circulation people were faxing instructions and phoning in requests that would be hand-written. It was 2001 and corporate CEOs were learning the newest of the new from a magazine whose print order program was written in Assembler language.

“Things were really out of date,” said Tom Masterson, who today serves as BW’s VP and Worldwide Circulation Director. “We were still printing labels for some things."

Employees were manually entering data into a disconnected series of independent databases ranging from FoxPro to Excel to Admarc. None of the databases communicated with each other so all the information was fragmented.

Of greater concern was the system’s reliance on a handful of employees who knew how to run the old software. Adding urgency to the problem, Masterson knew that one key employee was about to retire.

The old system “worked, but it was in danger of not working in the future,” he says. “We had a system that was very complex, very manual-intensive, and very dependent on one or two key people.”

While the old system sorely needed replacement, Masterson knew doing so would affect many departments within BusinessWeek, its corporate parent McGraw-Hill, and partners along the print supply chain.

The publication was using six different plants for printing. Four were in the U.S.—two Donnelly plants and two Perry Judd plants—one in Europe (Smeets) and one in Asia (Times Printing). It was distributed in 140 countries by two fulfillment houses and a complex postal arrangement. Their domestic service bureau at the time was EDS and it’s now Kable, while international fulfillment was QSS.

While the need to modernize was acute, the sheer size, scope, and complexity of producing the weekly print order made the classic ‘buy or build’ decision an easy one.

“There really aren’t that many large weekly magazines with more than one-million circulation, so there wasn’t an off-the-shelf software option,” Masterson says.

BusinessWeek would build. Masterson had his print order team develop a series of requirements that emphasized BusinessWeek’s need for a system that would be easy to maintain. At the same time, the BusinessWeek team developed a short list of five system vendors with experience in magazine publishing. The requirements were sent out as a request for proposal to the five vendors, all of whom were invited to participate in a pre-bid conference at BusinessWeek. About three weeks after the conference, the proposals arrived and two firms were invited back for presentations and discussions.

In the final analysis, BusinessWeek went with Pragmatix Inc., Elmsford, N.Y., a consulting and technology services company for publishers. Developed from the outset to be customizable and extensible, Pragmatix’s _Print Order Management Solution_ (POMS) delivered a truly custom-built package.

Hear William Abram speak on the process of planning and designing the new BusinessWeek system.

The core Pragmatix software provided a host of functions to reduce labor, mailing, and special handling costs. This included, for example, automating label instructions for the fulfillment service bureau, eliminating duplicate keying for special requests and traffic code assignments, eliminating paper labels, merging non-subscriber labels with the production run, automating Impoze inputs, and using static edition codes to establish version consistency from issue to issue.

The Pragmatix team spent about six weeks at BusinessWeek’s N.Y. headquarters to study the existing workflow. They watched orders come in and get processed. They met with multiple production managers. They examined the guts of interrelated systems. All the while, they were developing a model for the new approach.

The system was designed to be flexible, not just in terms of today’s requirements, but to meet future needs which are, as of yet, unknown, company officials say. To that end, POMS makes extensive use of tables and modular components that can be easily maintained by the publisher.

This facilitates rapid custom tailoring to a publisher’s workflow, as well as easy updates in response to evolving requirements. Masterson was sold on what he sees as Pragmatix’s unique turnkey, yet customizable approach.

“My general theory is that I would rather not be in the custom software business, but Pragmatix proved themselves to be the exception,” Masterson says.

For technicians, Pragmatix assembled a team of publishing veterans. This let them go beyond merely creating the system BusinessWeek thought it needed, to offering experienced counsel on what could be better approaches.

Once they defined the requirements and prepared recommendations for how to implement repairs, the Pragmatix group still had to sell their proposed approach to virtually all interested various constituencies throughout BusinessWeek.

This includes six magazine printers and two fulfillment houses, along with editors, and people in advertising, manufacturing, distribution, and other departments.

It wasn’t an easy sale. “The hardest part was getting the users to agree to the specs,” Masterson says. Pragmatix’s team was “very good” at documenting BusinessWeek’s requirements, and helping production managers across four different departments discern what they needed the system to do, Masterson says.

But defining requirements and putting them into software are two different things. “Each of the four major departments has its own needs, he says. “Everyone complained about the manual system, but no one wanted to change.”

The BW manager fears were typical of any large corporation: Fear of the unknown. “There was resistance to change for fear of an unknown adverse impact to the overall production process, said Bill Dugan, a Brewster, New Yorkm publishing fulfillment consultant that BW hired for the transition “People would say, ‘I’m getting the job done now independently of a centralized system. Will this cause new problems?’”

BusinessWeek at the time did not have a history of successful collaboration projects, which only added to the resistance. Department managers feared that their input would be ignored and some other department might reign supreme, Dugan said, adding that another fear was that it would take up too much time.

Those managers also knew that sweeping changes could adversely impact—albeit temporarily--supplier data sharing. That fear came out in questions like “Supplier need their information in this format only. Changes to the layout or contents will cause problems,” Dugan recalled.

BW’s Masterson added that the overall BW culture back then did not generally embrace change. “Putting out a large weekly magazine means very tight deadlines week in and week out, for every department involved in the process,” he said. “I think people tend to be reluctant to mess with something that is working and getting the job done. It's the old saw about if it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

Despite all those concerns, the business case for making major changes won the day.

“What made me personally decide to change the old system was that I saw outsourcing our subscription fulfillment system as a good opportunity for BW to upgrade a lot of other areas like print order management,” Masterson recalled.

Hear William Abram speak on the steamlining and versatility of the revised Print Order system.

He also stressed the imminent retirement of that key employee. “I suppose we could have trained another individual to take over the print order, but I felt it was a good time to just automate the process and upgrade.”

Dugan’s main recollection of the process was that once employees started working together, they discovered a lot of valuable data. “They began to share information that, in some cases, the other party needed but did not know that it even existed.”

Ultimately, Masterson says, Pragmatix helped the cross-disciplinary teams at BusinessWeek clearly define their crucial requirements. Through a series of staff meetings and many hours observing how the team worked with their existing arrangement, the Pragmatix team made a very detailed roadmap of how BusinessWeek published.

For example, when Pragmatix’s consultants discovered how the manual operations were utterly dependent on a few key employees, they immediately worked to extract that knowledge through a series of debriefings. The knowledge was then built into the application.

“A key element in the software design was the need to interface effectively with two domestic and international service bureaus, as well as BusinessWeek’s production management system,” Dugan says. , “Pragmatix was unique in their willingness to spend the many weeks needed to meticulously define all of the dataflow requirements for all these related systems.”

The result was “seamless interfaces that eliminated redundant keying of identical data,” Dugan says. In addition to delivering a perfectly tailored approach, this process speeded recovery of the $125,000 BusinessWeek spent to define and acquire the system.

Indeed, the software paid for itself in the first year through cost-savings and added efficiencies, Masterson says. The system not only cost less to operate than the manual workflow. It’s also faster and more accurate than the process it replaced, and it’s not dependent on certain key personnel.

The change with the biggest impact: replacement of paper magazine shipping labels. This often became an issue whenever the circulation department had to deal with a special request from an advertiser or editor.

Say an editor is speaking at a conference in Seattle, and he wants 1,000 copies of the latest issue sent to the show. This used to require someone to manually fill out forms to intercept the print run, and have 1,000 issues packaged and shipped out separately.

It was expensive and time-consuming from both a labor and postal perspective.

Now, using a Web-based form in the software built by Pragmatix, BusinessWeek’s production people can have 1,000 copies bundled with the new address, and dispense with the problem in literally seconds.

The automated system also delivers higher data accuracy by reducing typos and automating delivery decisions, Masterson says: “For special copies, it was confusing [as to] what delivery method should be used. Was it for a speech? To go to a key CEO? Due overnight or a week later? This [new system] automates and sorts out how things go.

Production workers can also automate requests. “We let requesters set up standing requests for, say, fast shipment of the issue to the CEO of a big advertiser for three months,” says Bill Abram, CEO of Pragmatix. “For the first time, they can set up that request automatically.”

BusinessWeek realizes greater advantages on special requests of fewer than 20 magazines. “BusinessWeek was preparing labels by hand, individually affixing them to the magazine, and mailing them separately,” Abram says. “We set it up so the label information is sent electronically to the printer, merged with the subscriber labels, then ink-jetted onto the magazine cover.”

Eliminating the extensive manual handling produced significant savings in time and money. In addition, these special copies can now be presorted and mailed using the maximum postal discounts, for further savings.

Another thorny aspect of special requests are the multiple comp lists that BusinessWeek maintains for reporters’ sources and sales reps’ key advertisers. Employees rarely bothered to delete names and addresses that no longer needed or were eligible for the comps.

The result: comp names might stay on the lists indefinitely, driving up printing and postage costs. Yet there was no simple way to identify why a particular comp name should or should not be on the list, making it risky for business managers to delete them.

Contrast that to BusinessWeek’s new system, where every employee with comp privileges can ‘sponsor’ a fixed number of names. If they want to add a new name and they’ve reached their maximum allocation, they must first delete another name. And when an employee leaves, their replacement is given their predecessor’s comp list, and can add or delete names at will.

Masterson also sees editorial and production advantages gained from the ability to push later deadlines, better accommodating breaking news and last-minute advertisers. Because the application resides on Pragmatix’s servers, it can be accessed securely from anywhere in the world, via the Web.

Major concerns with custom developed software are support, compatibility, and extensibility. Pragmatix addresses these issues by driving the application workflow through data tables that can be directly updated by the publisher, as opposed to requiring custom programming at hourly fates.

“When people hear ‘custom’, they think work in existing systems will have to be scrapped,” says Howard Stevens, Pragmatix’s VP of software development. “The core of [our] application remains relatively the same. It’s customized using a data-driven approach. It’s not the [program] code that is being customized, but the underlying data. That means that the customer can easily customize and modify it at will.”

This is in stark contrast with pre-fab approaches, and yet another reason BusinessWeek opted out of a canned product strategy. “With an off-the-shelf product, there is typically significant time shoe-horning it into existing systems,” Stevens says. “With this custom [Pragmatix] system, those compromises are unnecessary.”

The fact that this system in based on a remote server and uses a Web browser interface also makes it attractive, Stevens says. The browser-based software doesn’t have to be manually installed on every PC or Mac, and the Web-based user experience is intuitive, reducing training costs.

Hear William Abram speak on the Return on Investment on this project.

With a one-year ROI, faster and more accurate results and a truly customized package, maybe BusinessWeek has discovered the business joys it has been telling others about for years.