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Books Production Workflow and Tracking
Executive Summary
A prominent non-profit educational publisher headquartered in Washington, DC, was looking to go digital. The client was currently using manual processes to manage their workflows, which did not offer them much flexibility or scalability. The client wanted to upgrade to a fully integrated content production process comprising of cloud-based platforms, editorial tools, and scalable production services. With a strong and dedicated team in place, MPS managed to implement the entire integrated workflow management system within a short span of six weeks.
Challenges & Requirements
During the implementation, we transitioned the client from a set of manual processes to a fully integrated system. To accomplish all of it in a short duration, our team dealt with the following challenges:
- Frequent template changes based on the grades.
- Lack of flexibility and scalability to accommodate the growing demands in the current systems and production processes.
- Adapting the Math workflow for students and teachers based on XML workflow was a complicated process.
- The short TAT for production within their ecosystem.
- Out-of-system email communications and offline follow-ups between various stakeholders was making the whole process error-prone and slow.
- The reports generated by the system suffered from a lot of discrepancies in terms of dates and workflow stage information.
- Non-availability of an automated system to handle the multiple correction rounds for student and teacher editions.
- The requirement of output delivery in multiple formats – XML, EPUB, print, and online PDF.
How the Solution Helped
MPS designed an end-to-end custom solution for the client, catering to all the specific requirements as per the industry standards. The solution consisted of several modules of MPS DigiCore (Digital Publishing Suite) along with production services. Some of the critical components and integrations and their contribution to the entire solution have been illustrated as below:
- MPSTrak platform was swiftly customized and implemented for the workflow management automating various workflows for the client.
- The third party Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform (Bynder) was integrated with MPSTrak through APIs. Following were the benefits of this integration:
- It allowed automated fetching of complete job information including, metadata, workflow task, stage duration, and total publication duration.
- It provided customer staff and supplier teams with access to the artwork jobs without logging in to the DAM. It also lets the customer auto-generate tags, duplicate/clone records, and generate on-demand reports.
- The MPS team provided prescriptive reports to enhance the work efficiency of in-house employees.
- The issues pertaining to pre-editing and styling, artwork processing, and graphic production were resolved using the MPS DigiXML platform and MPS AMS (Artwork Management System) respectively.
- Single source XML-first composition was implemented through MPS DigiComp (Adobe InDesign-based automated composition engine).
- The entire production setup was implemented end-to-end on cloud infrastructure to achieve high levels of agility for the system.
- The manual errors were significantly reduced through integrated validation and QC tools.
- Cloud-based review and corrections handling was established to enable collaboration among different stakeholders.
Results and Benefits
- Deployed an XML-based production system that enabled single-source multichannel publishing.
- Delivered multiple output formats such as PDF/Web PDF/XML/EPUB /Archive.
- Created a dashboard with online status reports providing key actionable business insights for better administration.
- Achieved a significant reduction in the turn-around time (~25%).
- Delighted the customer with higher efficiency through automated management of production tasks.
- Provided scalable production infrastructure to the client through the implementation of a cloud ecosystem.