Content Be Nimble, Content Be Quick
Patti Ward is the director of product management for Wolters Kluwer Health, a $900 million division of international publisher Wolters Kluwer. She joined the company in 1996 as a production assistant, but new responsibilities found her re-engineering business processes for the past five years.
“We were no longer responsible for putting ink on paper, and paper in the mail. As the industry demands have shifted, so have our production technologies,” Ward explains.
As has been the case with most publishers, the impact of digital media has been profound for Wolters Kluwer Health (www.WKHealth.com), which serves professionals and students in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry. Ward compares the evolution of digital to a “tidal wave.”
“That’s really the only way I can describe it,” she stresses. “And as we’ve tried to manage through it, we didn’t have increased budgets. But we had to now produce multiple formats, and put them out to multiple delivery points. How do you manage that type of content?”
Build or buy
No matter the output intention—print or electronic—expeditious and efficient publishing was Wolters Kluwer Health’s top priority, and with the emerging challenges of new media, a new workflow was in order.
“We are a publishing company, and content is our revenue,” Ward affirms. “We don’t get the revenue until our content hits the market.”
In 2004, Ward began putting together cross-functional teams—one focused on business processes, the other on technology—and the groups began to brainstorm about workflow. “We had two choices: build or buy,” Ward recalls. “We knew there was no single application that would meet all of our needs. From the beginning, we intended to do some heavy customization.
“We also knew we had to grow the workflow into a solution that would allow us to grab content at any point in the process, and pivot it out to multiple delivery points,” Ward adds. “… And we were looking for schedule and cost reduction.”
The company faced some particular publishing challenges. Content was coming in from authors in every type of digital format and needed to be distilled down to a common format and then trafficked through several revision cycles before it would even be considered for publication.
“Content” included not only copy submitted by editorial contributors, but also art and graphic files, digital advertising files and copyright information.
The assets had to be nimble, too—publishable to print or online, or both.
Making their vision a reality
Once the cross-functional teams had identified their challenges and mapped out their ideal workflow, Ward went in search of a software developer who could bring it to fruition.
“We looked at 12 vendors,” she recalls. “… There were a lot of lower-cost solutions that would have resolved our immediate problems, but we couldn’t have grown with it.”
Wolters Kluwer Health chose to partner with EMC, whose enterprise content management (ECM) platform enabled them to build a customized publishing system that took advantage of digital asset management, XML and workflow capabilities.
“EMC was a strong company,” Ward suggests. “They had great revenue growth and high R&D, so we thought, let them invest in the base platform, and let Wolters Kluwer Health invest in building a publishing application on top of it.”
The result was an application called “PubFusion,” and with the help of a third-party integrator, Flatirons Solutions, it went live in March 2005. “We currently publish 200 titles using PubFusion, from 12 locations in five countries,” Ward says.
PubFusion, according to Ward, acts as the hub of the publishing engine, tying together software applications like Epic Editor, Adobe Creative Suite, Editorial Manager and ScholarOne on the workflow’s front end, and business and fulfillment systems used by the back offices.
The new workflow begins with a Web-based, peer-review system that feeds articles directly into the EMC Documentum platform, where content is tagged and stored, and revisions are managed. The system has also been designed to automatically process content based on defined business rules for each particular journal. As content is approved for publishing, output-appropriate file formats are automatically generated.
The Benefits
“We’re now able to pivot content out to multiple points,” Ward explains. “So, the system now grabs the right files, based on the delivery point. So, if it’s a journal going online, the system grabs one type of content—for example, JPEGs, SGML or XML. And if it’s going to a print delivery, it will grab a high-resolution PDF.
“We take in a tremendous amount of art,” Ward adds. “And as we take that in, we automatically generate all the necessary formats based on that journal’s delivery format. And every time a person works on an original image, those renditions are recreated and stored.”
Content is now fully searchable, too.
“One of our sister companies supplies reprints, and they can use the system to search by keywords through our journals and then sell reprints of articles that are particularly hot topics,” Ward notes. “They … used to have to get our journals out and actually read through them, searching for these relevant keywords.”
Another perk may be realized in the future, as the publisher dives deeper into rich media, as the EMC Documentum Digital Asset Manager can help manage video clips, sound and other multimedia assets beyond copy and images.
The publisher reports that after the first year of using the new workflow, it has been able to reduce cycle time—from manuscript submission to publication—by 10 percent. And with additional development, the workflow is expected to reduce cycle time further, by as much as 30 percent.
Roll-out of the new publishing system required thoughtful planning, according to Ward, who says it’s not just a matter of training employees on new software. Rather, this workflow overhaul represented a more significant cultural shift for the company. It helped to have buy-in not only from senior executives, with whom the cross-functional teams met monthly, but also the personnel who’d be using the new workflow.
“The company allowed us to provide tremendous incentives to our employees,” Ward explains. “We ran contests and gave out iPods as prizes, and we also hosted a big party when we launched.”
Naturally, there was a learning curve, and Ward says they expected a six-month drop in productivity as employees adapted to the new workflow. The prediction was right on the money.
Ward says that the ROI for PubFusion has exceeded even her wildest imagination. “We did invest significant money—$2 million dollars,” she confides. “But the first-generation release has already paid for itself within nine months of operation.”
The publisher also saw a reduction in advertising makegoods. “If we ran the wrong ad, because we’d picked up the wrong version, for example, we didn’t get the revenue. We’ve seen a savings there, simply by looking at how often we have to do a redo,” Ward explains. “So we not only saw benefits in cost and schedule, but quality, too.”
Above and beyond what the solution has saved the company itself, it has also presented a new revenue opportunity for the publisher.
“The irony of all of this is, after we launched, we started getting calls from people, other publishers, who’d heard what we’d done and wanted to learn more,” Ward recalls. “So, we’ve done some demonstrations of the solutions to a few external organizations, and we’ll now be packaging PubFusion as a solution for other publishers. That was an offshoot of the project that I’d never expected!”
Periodic Check-ups
Workflow should never be a static thing, Ward proposes: “You have to constantly reassess and re-evaluate.” Already, PubFusion has evolved beyond its initial release; the company was in the process of rolling out version 2.0 during the spring. She expects the second iteration will pay for itself within three to six months of its launch.
If you ask Ward what the future will bring for Wolters Kluwer Health—or even what version 3.0 of PubFusion might look like—she’s hesitant to make any predictions, and she marvels at how quickly technology evolves in the digital age.
“We’ve had 200 years of print experience, but only a few years or so of digital experience. … The publishing industry is changing so much. In fact, change is a constant for us,” Ward reflects. BB
Gretchen A. Peck is a freelance author who writes about the international printing and publishing industries. She can be reached at GretchenPeck@Verizon.net.