News

3rd August 2009
Production changes keep seven on its toes

Seven’s sister

The expansion of her organisation through acquisition has kept Seven Publishing Group’s Sophie Finch occupied of late, but she’s still keeping abreast of new production developments, she tells Andy Knaggs.

Sophie Finch is of the opinion that refreshing her production department and its processes every few years is the right approach, which is fortunate because, whether she has liked it or not, Finch, Seven Publishing Groups’s production director, has had plenty of change to cope with in recent years.

The most recent change, and a major one, was the acquisition of fellow agency Square One in 2007, and the creation of Seven Squared, bringing the company’s headcount to 160, a far cry from the 35 employed by what was then New Crane Publishing when Finch joined in 1997, after seven years at John Brown.

“We’re trying to merge the two cultures, and it has been interesting because if you look back, we have never stood still for very long,” she considers. “It has been constant change, and we have picked up things that have taken us forward, and let things go that were inefficient.”

Hence, Finch’s positive acceptance of the opportunity to look at the production department afresh. Her production team of six looks after around 30 titles now, 23 of them inherited through acquisition, some pure contract titles, others being consumer magazines; the print and paper spend is £12 million a year.

Square One had its own production staff that had to be merged with the Seven team, and a restructure in February this year was a chance to also look at costs while striving to maintain efficiency. The position of Finch’s deputy was removed as a consequence, with responsibility devolved to Finch herself for new business, and across the production department for press-passing, ordering paper and checking invoices.

It has not always been about growth, therefore, but the general trend of expansion in the business has necessitated a degree of rethinking in terms of how Finch and her team track the progress of magazines. With more titles on board, the department has a larger number of sometimes smaller projects to manage. This is still a manual process involving paperwork, but Seven is in the process of rolling out the GoPublish publishing system from Oppolis (distributed in the UK by Colyer Group), which it will use for processes such as flatplanning, document management and online approvals.

With clients to please, the stakes are higher than simply missing a deadline, as most publishers battle against. Mistakes in production can cause embarrassment further along the line, so its very important that everyone sings from the same hymn sheet, and that’s what Finch is trying to pull together.

“I’m quite an organised person, so I don’t like things to go wrong,” says Finch. “Our processes are a means to an end – to stop us making mistakes and letting down the commercial teams and the clients. Most people see the benefit of that, but we do have quite a few pockets of different working cultures.

“With GoPublish, some parts of the business are used to working in certain ways, and don’t want something imposed on them. It’s about getting confidence and buy-in from people.”

Finch reveals that GoPublish is being rolled out on Sainsbury’s Magazine, one of the company’s highest profile titles. Aside from the internal management of putting the magazine together, there will be benefits for the client also, she explains:

“We have a creative services agency for Sainsbury that’s very client facing and handles in-store literature and direct mail. The client has to be able to approve work and get a quick turnaround, and we see big benefits from GoPublish on that side of our business.”

Public sector clients such as DEFRA and the Training & Development Agency for schools (TDA) are already using the GoReview module of GoPublish, while on the consumer magazine side its use will be internal: flatplanning, document management, and version control. “It will also help with ad planning because we still print out tiny colour lasers for every page, stick them on a board and move them around. GoPublish will allow us to do it online,” says Finch.

“The rationale to use GoPublish was that internally it formalises the workflow and takes out the possibilityof human error. So there are time savings, and for clients it’s a big thing to be able to efficiently

 

 

approve proofs without having pieces of paper to circulate. Between those two things, it allows us to manage our costs. We can measure more accurately and show clients how many version changes we’ve done, so we can manage our resources better.”

While the GoPublish software does not have a repro back end to it, and Finch doesn’t envisage a time when all repro is handled in-house anyway, she is keen to use the image management modules in GoPublish so that a greater degree of page planning can be done internally, as she says “there’s no reason why designers can’t plan a page as they go”. She adds: “It’s not as easy as it looks since we might get lots of images from an agency in low res, and there’s still culturally an expectation that it will be done in repro. With these GoPublish image management modules though, we are trying to move people to working in a way that will allow us to bring repro in-house in terms of planning.”

Finch has been thinking about the pros and cons of in-house repro for some time, and currently the publisher uses the services of four companies: Alta Image, F1 Colour, Keenes and Zebra. Partly this list has been inherited as Seven has acquired other publishing agencies, and while she says the company may at some point review this supplier base, she does not see Seven Squared using less than two repro houses going forward.

“My reticence about in-house repro is down to colour management and retouching skills,” she explains. “The integrity of the image is more variable now than it was with transparencies. We could see very easily in a lightbox whether an image was up to scratch, but now people are looking at images in so many different environments, it can be so much more subjective if not properly measured. From that point of view, repro companies still have a lot of expertise in that area.”

Keeping on top of standards is also important, and an area where repro companies can be of assistance. She notes that the FOGRA28 characterisation dataset, which relates to Lightweight Coated (LWC) web offset papers, has just been replaced by an updated dataset, FOGRA46, and recalls that a few weeks previously there had been some discussion about whether proofs that Seven Squared had sent to a supplier were using the even older FOGRA27 for gloss and matte coated papers, which was superceded by FOGRA39 some time ago.

“It’s interesting because a few years ago people would say ‘this is a Cromalin, it’s perfect’, and anything else was considered rubbish. Now you’ve got to have the right profile,” she observes.

There is also a great deal going on in the realms of soft proofing, but Finch isn’t tempted yet, believing that not only does the kit remain too costly, but it is also still a step too far for most of the publisher’s colour-sensitive magazines. She says: “Even with hard proofs that are FOGRA-certified and use all the profiles, the results are still not spot-on because of the variances of printing. We do trust our repro companies that soft proofing is acceptable there, so it’s not the kit, it’s largely a cost thing.”

Can she see much discussed press-side soft proofing becoming commonplace? “I’m a little suspicious of press-side soft proofing, though I’m not sure why,” she confesses. “I think it’s a way off and someone has to pay for it. It’s an area that I don’t think printers have historically been told to put a lot of resource into. It has taken a long time to introduce curves and colour profiles in web offset printers, which publishers adopted, along with pass4press guidelines, long before. The printers are very good at manufacturing but do seem to have taken a while to embrace the same profiling standards as prepress work.”

Like many print buyers, it has been a tricky time for Finch in looking to place work with print suppliers that she can be certain will survive in this tough market. Four of Seven’s print suppliers have fallen by the wayside in the last few years, prompting Finch to describe selecting a printer as “playing Russian Roulette”. The four have foundered for different reasons, even though they were all producing high quality print.
“It’s hard. I talk to as many people as possible and I try to talk to people that don’t have a vested interest – people in other sectors of the market, fellow production directors, friends in the industry,” she says.

“At the moment, my policy is to spread the risk, whereas a few years ago, as an independent publisher, I was very supportive of independent printers. I’m wary of single site printers, although Sainsbury’s Magazine and Delicious are printed at Southernprint.”

And of course, as a contract publisher Seven Squared has to be receptive to the thoughts, and indeed scrutiny, of its clients regarding procurement decisions; some clients have their own production and procurement expertise to call upon, others are more hands-off. These are issues that demand flexibility from a production head in contract publishing environments – demands to which Finch, after her experience of recent years, is well accustomed.

 

12th December 2007
John Brown salutes a system that lets it just Go Publish

Contract publisher John Brown had been looking for the right flatplanning system for some time, without success, until it came across Oppolis’ Go Publish software.

Richard Sacré soon expects to find himself in what he describes as a fairly unique position after more than a dozen years as an IT director in publishing, and all because of a simple software product.

He believes he’s found a panacea to cure many of contract publishing group John Brown’s publishing workflow issues – a flatplanning and page review system called Go Publish from Oppolis Software. He measures each word with precision, so making them resound with greater magnitude.

“Once Go Publish has been successfully rolled out across thebusiness I think that as an IT director I will be in a fairly unique position of actually having been able to make an incredibly positive difference to three hundred people. Never in my 12-13 years in IT has an opportunity arisen that is so well rounded, so easy to adopt, and that has so much potential – and I’m pretty excited about that. It has created a buzz in account management and new business, and it has already been included in the pitch process.”

These words make an impressive testimonial for any software system, and are delivered without hyperbole in answer to a simple question from PMM about the business benefits of Go Publish.

Sacré expands further: “Fundamentally, the benefits are to do with collaboration. Go Publish allows the entire business to collaborate on all our publications to remove the time consuming, manual processes of creating PDFs and flatplans, printing flatplans, pagination changes, which are incredibly painful, and folio changes, which are also incredibly painful.

“It has allowed us to communicate and share files with our clients, with finite control as to who is alerted, for what, and why. With Go Publish we have absolute ability to involve who we want with every single file that needs reviewing. It’s a unified flatplan across Mac and PC. Designers, account management and production are typically all on different floors, so they would normally have to communicate with each other and request updates as to where things are in the production schedule.

“That process alone, for updating a flatplan manually, was incredibly debilitating as a business. The fact
that anyone can have the flatplan on their screen will be one of the biggest timesavers.” Sacré’s enthusiastic support for Go Publish is something that was echoed at PMM’s recent PrintMedia Forum, where UK distributor Colyer Group was showing the Oppolis software. Numerous attendees expressed admiration for the system.

For John Brown, although the roots are earlier, this story really began in around February of this year. It had been looking for a flatplan solution for some time, but Sacré felt that nothing on the market was right for the company, especially not at the prices being quoted. So there was a basic need for a flatplanning solution, and allied to that was the requirement for a better way of tracking pages that were going through production and approval stages with clients. John Brown was using a company extranet for this.

The requirement was brought into sharper focus when the contract publisher acquired Code London, a catalogue publishing company, in the middle of 2006. Code handles the production of the Woolworths Big Red Book catalogue, amongst others. When there are 650 pages each to be individually created, amended, proofed, approved and made print ready, a workflow that involves more than Microsoft Excel spreadsheets is certainly advisable. This was basically what John Brown was doing to track page progress at that point however. It was, Sacré admits, “insanely time consuming”.

So, in February 2007 Sacré approached Colyer Group, with whom he already had a relationship, and enquired about systems that provided more efficient tracking of pages. Oppolis Go Publish was suggested. Sacré picks up the tale: “We had a look and immediately decided that this system ticked pretty much all the boxes that we thought needed ticking across the entire organisation, for flatplanning and for our extranet. We did some research into the product and spoke to existing users, and we found that their needs tallied with ours, so we felt confident.”

Go Publish, and the approval module Go Review, were therefore implemented initially in the Code London part of the John Brown Group, handling hefty

 

catalogue production schedules. “We didn’t want to dictate to the whole business, but the first time we saw Go Publish we knew it was right,” says Sacré. “We brought it in for Code London, and it was a live trial with a capital ‘L’. Production schedules were so tight and we adopted it a third of the way through one catalogue, which was incredibly brave of that team to do.”

The implementation went well, and Sacré says there is now a rollout plan which should see all John Brown publications migrate to Go Publish in the next six months. He likens the reaction of the company staff to the system to that when Adobe InDesign was installed in place of Quark.

“It is just like going from Quark to InDesign. People were nervous, but the moment the first magazine went through successfully there was a queue outside the door. We have some very keen users of Go Publish.”

It is the sheer simplicity of the software, allied with powerful functionality, and the look and feel that he likes about Go Publish. The flatplan has an automatic “round-robin” quality to it, whereby everyone can see the very latest version because it constantly refreshes after actions have been made. Staff throughout John Brown always have an accurate snapshot of where files are within the production cycle.

Importantly, it did not require expensive training programmes or significant changes to working practices throughout the organisation to make Go Publish work, says Sacré. “Usually, when you install any new system it means a new way of working, which needs quite a lot of training, and disciplines that might be different to how the organisation would put something together.

“Go Publish was unique because all of those key stages are simply already there, but ironed out, laid out logically and with an ease of use that means you don’t have to spend large amounts of money on training and organising staff. The system is intuitive and it automatically puts in the functionality that we partly had but we continue to strive for through disparate systems of varying quality and cost.”

Working with Oppolis and Colyer Group, John Brown continues to adapt the software for its own requirements, and continues to discover more and more elements of Go Publish that are of use. There is no simple answer to the question of what Sacré believes the software can do for John Brown. He says: “The list is endless. When I had to report to the board on this, keeping it down to two pages was difficult. I still don’t think we’ve realised all the benefits.”

Oppolis Software, the company which has developed Go Publish and the modules that accompany it, was set up in 2003 by directors with a background in publishing software on the newspaper side of the industry.

Director John Simcox says that Oppolis observed how crowded the newspaper publishing solution market was but saw potential in magazine publishing. “It’s a pretty good product for magazine and contract publishers because it brings a newspaper level of functionality down into the smaller world of five to ten man teams trying to do a planning and publishing role who are not going to pay £200,000 for a system. We tried to make it as simple as possible because users are really just interested in building pages.”

Go Publish consists of a base planning module plus modules for picture management, editorial workflow, page review and approval, advertising management, and archiving/e-editions. Though built initially on Adobe InDesign technology, it can be used with Quark also on a Mac platform. It provides a simple colour-coded status view and a thumbnail view of the flatplan. When a change is made to a page in InDesign and saved to InDesign Server, the change is then made automatically in the plan also. Page number and folio changes are also made automatically through InDesign Server, or whenever the flatplan is next opened.

Go Review can provide either a PDF with full Acrobat collaborative tools for annotation and approval, or a simple high res JPEG view, with the possibility of attaching notes to particular parts of the image. An icon next to the page in the designer’s InDesign palette shows when changes have been requested. The system can be used as a simple and inexpensive digital asset management resource.

What Go Publish does not pretend to be is a full high end production system, where files are being manipulated in a prepress sense, ripped and sent for final print – Go Publish sits earlier in the production schedule, in planning, creation and client approval of content.



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