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Compuscript
2 . Background
2.1 Company Information
Founded in 1991 by MD, Michael Cushley, Compuscript is one of Europe's
top specialist pre-press bureaux providing services for publishers producing
both conventional books and journals as well as electronic publications.
Prior to starting Compuscript, Michael was a product manager at Elsevier
Science, one of the largest publishers of scientific publications in the
world. Historically, in the printing industry, the publisher would have
been the printer, the typesetter and the editor with all production being
undertaken in house. In the late 1980s and early 1990s this began to change.
Slowly, publishers started to focus on core activities and downsizing
started, with key components of the production process being outsourced
to sub-contractors - experts in each of their own areas – while publishers
did what they did best, finding and initiating publications and providing
sales and marketing support. Cushley saw an opportunity in outsourcing
and left Elsevier to set up Compuscript, as a copy editing business. The
process of copy editing is specifically concerned with how a finished
article is going to read and look. Copy editing specifically involves
reviewing an article for specific style points such as spelling (U.S.
versus British), grammar, punctuation etc and also in relation to readability,
i.e. restructuring sentences and paragraphs where an author’s native
language may not be English. In relation to the copy editing of scientific
papers the copy editor is not primarily concerned with the scientific
content of the paper (this is taken as given), but with how the author
presents this content within the generalised style of the publication.
The copy editor makes sure that the author abides to the typographic style
of the publication and also that they are consistent in use of terminology,
measurement etc.
The volume of work increased and Compuscript started taking on larger
projects (including books), outsourcing specific production roles as and
when required. Compuscript was getting more and more involved in the entire
production process and, eventually, it was decided that the next likely
area to be outsourced by publishers would be typesetting. Compuscript
grew to accommodate this new area of business. In 1991 the company invested
in its first typesetting system, K2, a major investment for the company
at that time. Unfortunately, around 12 months later, the software vendor,
Science Typographers Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection in the USA
and Compuscript was left with an expensive software package that was unsupported,
and on which they would receive no further training.
At that time, the business was going from strength to strength but new
projects were being turned away - without support and training from the
software vendor, they had little idea as to how many of the features worked
(only 60% of the functionality was being used). The system couldn’t
be further developed or customised to meet the needs of new customers
and a lot of the work was being done manually (more than should have been
necessary).
Contacts were made in the US and a ‘support group’ was formed.
Using this group, rather than changing the system, functionality was built
and bolted onto the system to make it better suit the needs of Compuscript.
At that point, the system had been developed primarily to support the
needs of Elsevier, Compuscript’s main client, that generated 80%
of their business. The downside of this was that, as development proceeded,
the system had a narrower and narrower focus primarily servicing the needs
of this one client. “We could only support clients who were
similar to
our biggest client and had similar products”, commented Morgan Lyons,
General Manager at Compuscript.
Morgan Lyons joined as company in an accounting capacity in 1996. Morgan
developed an interest in IT and worked closely with the support group
in the US. Given that they were all part time resources with 9-5 jobs
themselves it didn’t take long to burn that resource out! Through
the support group a full time developer with experience in typesetting
system development was sourced. “Once we took charge of the code
things took off from there but it became apparent that we were running
to stand still” added Lyons. Even with the old systems, a refocus
of process and costs meant that a corner was turned in 1996 and since
then revenue increased by 260% with net profit increasing by 600%. In
1999 the management team undertook a complete review of the company to
identify the strategy they should adopt going forward, how they could
reduce costs and become more efficient. One of the ways this could be
achieved was through the implementation of an eBusiness system designed
to streamline the communication process between Compuscript, sub contractors
and customers. With a grant from the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Acceleration
Fund, Compuscript was able to make this strategy
a reality.
2.2 Market Information
In 1996/1997 the potential of the web became apparent to publishing houses
as it allowed for dissemination of information more quickly than was historically
possible with printed publications. Often, this alone could sway an author
on which publisher to use for a publication and publishers rushed around,
trying to understand how they could best cater for this.
The first issue was getting content online but very few of them had a
clear strategy and started to simply invest in products. Even within the
same company, different regional offices would have different ideas, strategies
and specifications for how they wanted to distribute content online.
Technology was driving the market, not the other way round, as it should
have been. Prior to this, all work had been supplied in hardcopy and everyone
dealt with paper. At that time, the most important people to employ were
those with good keyboard skills! When a new document was received, it
would go to a copy editor who would write changes onto the proof and pass
back to typist/keyboard operator for the changes to be made.
Publishers then started to send out files on disk and that was the next
challenge. At the end of the day, although files were being supplied on
disk there was still only one product, the printed product. Around 1997
publishers started to look at electronic publishing as a way of quickly
disseminating articles via the
Internet . At that time, Compuscript had an electronic typesetting system
that could output files in a digital format. Even with this old system,
Compuscript could now output two end products – one to the printer
for hard copy and another to the publisher for ePublishing. In order to
do this, another piece of functionality had to be bolted on at the back-end
of the system.
At this time, publishers started to play with SGML, an ISO standard for
description of electronic items – HTML was the first globally accepted
standard part of SGML but was only concerned with how something looked
in an Internet browser (e.g. bold, italic or font size). If a user did
a search on say ‘Shannon Airport’, a search engine like Google,
might have returned Shannon Airport, Shannon River, Shannon Ohio or film
starts called Shannon. Scientific material was more context based and
therefore needed to be ‘marked-up’ (e.g. tagging keywords and
authors names) to allow for quicker searching and more defined results.
In order to achieve this, tagging and coding of the article was required
– there could have been many tens of references and sources, each
one with various combinations of author surname, initial, title, year,
country of publishing, start page-finish page, volume number and year.
SGML was decided upon as the ‘standard’ for tagging articles
and the emphasis was put on supplying files that could meet these standards.
As the focus changed from hard copy to eCopy, the requirements put on
companies like Compuscript by the publishers increased.
A copy editor was paid a standard page rate regardless of how good or
bad the quality of the article was. Some 10 page articles may have taken
one hour to check and others may have taken 10 hours – the rate would
be the same for both. As technology came further to the fore, publishers
assumed that the amount of work to be carried out was less and the page
rate dropped further as a result. Compuscript was no longer able to increase
price as publishers were pushing for price reductions. As part of the
company review, the team had to look at the overall process and its efficiency
in a bid to reduce overheads.
Competition from the Far East
Another major reason for Compuscript to become more competitive was the
threat of increased competition from companies in the Far East (primarily
China and India). Many of the issues that restricted services exports
from those countries in the past -language, physical and geography, quality,
unreliability - were fast disappearing and publishers started to develop
good relationships with these vendors. Relationships were further facilitated
by the
ease of communication and transfer of documents via the Internet .
Like many vendors in Ireland, Compuscript was becoming uncompetitive when
compared to these new suppliers. Conversely, there was also a potential
opportunity for Compuscript to use these new suppliers in a bid to drive
down its own overheads.
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