Eliminate Steps For An 'Intelligent' Workflow

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 2000 by Jo Bennett

AUTOMATION AND UPDATING YOUR PROCESSES WILL REDUCE TIME AND ERROR IN YOUR PRODUCTION CYCLE, AND LET YOU CREATE A BETTER-MANAGED, SMARTER SYSTEM.

How efficient is your workflow? How wisely are the resources available to you being used? Regardless of how smoothly their operations appear to be humming along, most publishers agree that there's always room for improvement. At many magazines, certain tasks are still needlessly duplicated at different stages of the game--for example, advertising insertion-order information being keyed in by both ad sales and production instead of being captured from the beginning in a commonly accessible database. Factor in the number of manually performed or initiated tasks that are repetitive, or that just plain don't require human interpretation, and it all adds up to a tremendous waste of valuable resources--which means a drain of money from your budget.

These glaring, frustrating realities exist in part because of the time and expense involved in finding and implementing workflow solutions, but also because there is no such thing as a "standard" workflow. Because every production department is run differently, what might work for one company would not be possible at another. But as the business of manufacturing magazines becomes increasingly door-to-door digital, many publishers are exploring how process automation and managed workflow can help them work smarter and more efficiently.

Fewer hand-offs

Production departments are continually accommodating the learning curves that new technologies have presented over the decade. Publishers are still becoming acquainted with computer-to-plate technologies, for instance. "But if you look at the larger picture, it just takes less time to manage digital information," says Kathleen Davis, director of manufacturing at Taunton Press. "So, from a print production point of view, we've been able to add publications without adding people."

The Newtown, Connecticut-based publisher of special-interest magazines such as Fine Woodworking and Threads has added three titles to its roster over the past six years, and Davis says that the ability to integrate processes has made that possible. For example, to map each issue, Taunton's advertiser information is automatically downloaded from an ad sales database into Managing Editor Inc.'s ad layout software, then imported into QuarkX-Press for page layout.

Indeed, the more digital the workflow, the more opportunities to automate tasks. Automation doesn't eliminate actual processing time, but by sequentially linking tasks to occur, human hand-off time--and the potential for error--is minimized. "Human beings are prone to forgetting steps or doing them in an inappropriate order," says Alex Brown, president of Printmark, a consulting firm in East Montpelier, Vermont. "One of the greatest values of process automation is the intelligence inside it--every task that needs to be executed is remembered."

Scripting vs. software

Publishers can buy off-the-shelf systems, purchase specifically designed scripts, or write scripts of their own to automate tasks. Editorial management systems from companies such as Quark Inc. and North Atlantic Publishing Systems Inc. work based on the status of metadata tags that are attached to all files that enter the systems. When a status changes, the server "triggers" the system to automatically perform an action of some sort. But this option is still not only priced out of the range of many publishers (packages such as North Atlantic Publishing Systems and Quark Publishing Systems cost upward of $10,000), but often requires a dedicated server and regular maintenance, which many smaller publishers can't justify.

Scripting, which works on hot folders or directories that prompt processes, exists at the other end of the pricing spectrum. AppleScript allows you to link disparate software and, equally important, can be written for virtually every Macintosh-compatible application. (Visual Basic is the Windows version of scripting.) Most people who have tinkered with AppleScript agree that it's easy to learn, yet many publishers haven't explored this free tool that is built into every Macintosh start-up disk.

"It's very accessible, but I think it's still one of those things that people don't have a whole lot of time to play with and explore," says Regina Marsh, director of operations at New York City-based Cantor Design Associates Inc. "Once publishers get past that, I think they can find enormous opportunities to streamline many processes."

Targeting prepress

Printers and prepress houses have become highly automated businesses over the past decade, but publishers are just finally getting into the loop. Indeed, prepress is the area most suitable to automation because many tasks at that stage don't require human interpretation or judgment. Script routines or software can save publishers time by, for example, automatically substituting high-resolution images for low resolution, or batching files so they can RIP and proof overnight and be ready the very next day.