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Compuscript
4 . Decision
The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Acceleration fund was launched around
the time Compuscript was finalising its business strategy. eBusiness was
one of the ways the company could have moved forward and they were keen
to progress it. At that time, Shannon Development approached the management
team and suggested that Compuscript apply for the fund.
Commented Lyons, “If we hadn’t received the funding there is
no way we’d have been able to achieve what we did”.
Compuscript needed to put new systems in place but, without funding, the
project would have taken longer to implement and would have been more
difficult to sell to senior management.
5 . The Project
5.1 eBusiness Solution
5.1.1 Business Dimension
In order to solve many of the problems being encountered by Compuscript,
two main parts to the new eBusiness solution were identified:
- Development
of a new ‘portal’ intranet/extranet (Compuscript Tracking
and Management System – CTMS) to streamline communications and
reduce administration overhead.
- A new
typesetting and copy-editing system allowing the company to offer
a wider range of products to its clients.
CTMS –
Compuscript Tracking and Management System
The first part of Compuscript’s eBusiness solution was the development
of a fully integrated management information, data management and job
tracking system named CTMS (Compuscript Tracking and Management Information
System). This centralised system allowed all employees, sub contractors
and customers to interact directly with the company regardless of global
location. The system was developed in-house and built on core Internet technologies which allowed it to be accessed, via the WWW, from anywhere
in the world.
This system delivered:
- Seamless
integration of customers and suppliers into the Compuscript system
- Seamless
transfer and collection of work outsourced to freelancers
- Internal
tracking of all jobs and processes
- Increased
automation of process
- Reduced
communication and administration costs to Compuscript and its customers
- Ability
to monitor and assess, on a real time basis, profit levels and output
relative to budget (overall, by journal, by staff member and by article)
- Precise
job planning, both in terms of budgeting and agreeing delivery dates
- Extensions
to Compuscript’s service portfolio
Introduction
of the CTMS allowed Compuscript to capture all work in progress in electronic
format at the point of receipt. All articles were stored centrally allowing
users’ direct access to all electronic versions and components (artwork,
author and correspondence via the CTMS). It also allowed sub-contractors
to collect work for processing in the same way as any internal employee
– they simply logged on to the secure extranet and into the system
as though they were on-site. Physical collection and delivery of hardcopy
articles was no longer required.
This simple reduction in paper handling significantly reduced the administration
overhead for both Compuscript and its clients virtually immediately the
system was operational. Without the need to send hard copy files back
and forth, less re-keying and scanning of documents was required and,
for Compuscript, all the elements of the job were held in one central
repository and so were accessible to all staff members.
In the past, utilisation of Far Eastern suppliers was prohibitive due
to the delay in sending and receiving documents via courier. It was also
relatively expensive and required additional administrative resources
internally.
The new system allowed the threat of competition from developing Asian
economies to be embraced and turned into a benefit for the company. The
development of the CTMS made it feasible for Compuscript to outsource
low margin tasks to cheaper economies and therefore become more competitive.
The new system was unhindered by international time differences and allowed
staff in India to take a job from the system in what was the middle of
the night in Shannon. Then, by the time the Irish staff got to their desks
the next morning, the job was complete. It gave Compuscript a virtual
24hr production house.
This combination of new eWorkflow processes, the CTMS and centralised
hosting facilities, meant the company
could fully integrate external suppliers into the system in a seamless
manner. The move to freelancing work out to India alone resulted in a
40% reduction in editorial costs when compared with the cost of undertaking
the same work in Ireland.
Type Setting and Copy Editing System
Once the decision had been taken to proceed with an eBusiness model the
management team decided to
evaluate all aspects of the business to see what would be required. As
part of this review the team became aware of the need to replace the existing
typesetting system. This system served the company very well in the past
but it was felt that adoption of an eBusiness model required a more flexible,
efficient solution. Penta, the new type setting package, had a number
of key advantages over the previous system:
- More
Efficient - The new system was more efficient as it required less
correction time.
-
Greater Flexibility/ability to target higher margin markets –
The previous typesetting system had afforded the Compuscript a real
competitive advantage over the past number of years. Unfortunately
the customisation and development it had gone through focused heavily
on the needs of existing customers and not on the potential needs
of future customers. The move to the newer system opened the potential
to attract higher margin work. This work was made up of titles in
Compuscript’s traditional area of editorial expertise (e.g. academic,
primarily scientific in nature, research publications), but were outside
the standardised typographic styles for which Compuscript had customised
its system.
- Fully
supported - Since the demise of the software company which originally
developed and supplied the current system, Compuscript had been engaged
in a constant battle to support and develop the system. The new system
is fully supported
by both its US based developer and by L&M Imaging services in
the UK, Penta’s European partner.
-
eBusiness/workflow focused - The new system is more eBusiness
focused. It fully supports many Internet technologies including SGML
and HTML and, more importantly, XML. This allows Compuscript to streamline
production processes, tailoring set-ups to the particular electronic
formats required by the customer.
5.1.2
Technical Dimension
Compuscript ran a number of different systems so, as much of the technology
that runs the web is platform independent (i.e. doesn’t matter what
type of operating system is used to access it) it was decided that this
would be the best and most effective way to build the CTMS. Some of the
technologies being used internally included:
- Penta
typesetting system – UNIX based, ran on Sun Solaris (a UNIX
based server)
- CTMS
– the CTMS is run on Linux, one of many flavours of UNIX
operating system and uses a MySQL relational database for storage
accessed via an Apache web server using PHP and Perl scripts
In total,
Compuscript runs 30 PCs, 4 Sun Workstations and seven Apple Macs in addition
to several servers for storage of system data.
In order to protect the system data from hackers, firewall security was
also utilised.
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