Gene Therapy: Managing Workflow: How Top Publishers Keep Their Houses in Order

It was only 26 years ago that Leonard Shatzkin, the legendary, former Doubleday manufacturing director and industry consultant, wrote that the book industry’s use of computers to “measure the effect of forces amenable to management’s control … is close to zero” (“In Cold Type,” 1982, Houghton Mifflin). The last 25 years have seen the deficiencies discussed by Shatzkin dramatically addressed, and he would have to be impressed at the pervasive uses of the computer today.

In part one of this series (“From Book Proposal to Profit,” Book Business, February 2008), I described in some detail the integrated, computer-coordinated workflow-management systems perfected by two university presses, Stanford and Princeton. Here, I review some of the workflow-management features of two large publishing houses, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley and Sons; and two smaller houses, Regnery and RAND.

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Founded in 1924, Simon & Schuster (S&S) consists of a number of well-known imprints, including Simon & Schuster, Pocket Books, Free Press, Scribner, Atheneum Books for Young Readers and Little Simon. It distributes in 100 countries and has revenues of more than $800 million. Each year, it publishes nearly 2,000 new titles and manages an active backlist of about 14,000 titles. S&S also provides some or all of the elements of distribution and order fulfillment services to 10 or so other publishers, including Andrews McMeel, Viz, Kaplan and Harlequin.

For production and operations professionals, S&S is a marvelous case study in the evolution of scalable workflow management. It is currently completing the transformation of production, manufacturing and marketing systems to an integrated, digitally based platform to drive data management, product workflow and content distribution.

“We’re right in the middle of a major digital transition—we’ve had a digital asset management system since 1999—but we are now working in conjunction with our digital group and our publishing units to build an internal database that would aggregate XML content files, rights information and book metadata,” says Tom Masciovecchio, director of publishing systems.