Successful industrial practices simplify publishing
Today’s Complexity is Tomorrow’s Simplicity
Media today – ubiquitous and diverse
Media diversity – that's the term that best encapsulates the change sweeping across publishing houses and corporate publishers. Today's readers want to be able to get info anytime and everywhere, on diverse output devices. Greater diversity always spawns more complex workflows, so time and costs remain a daunting issue for all publishers and marketing departments.
Industrial manufacturing and logistics blazed the trail
The problems of complex processes have figured prominently in industrial manufacturing and logistics for years – time enough for bright minds to develop effective strategies. The lessons they learned can be put to good practice in publishing. Here too, the recipe for time and costs savings calls for standardization, automation, end-to-end process control. The latter serves to manage the entire workflow from planning to delivery.
To draw another parallel to industrial applications, content has to be delivered from third-party systems 'just in sequence'. This means that the publishing system must be able to requisition a third-party system at a certain time, and then integrate the delivered results seamlessly into the publishing process. These results can include texts generated by a translation memory system or images that have been edited or adapted. Routine manual chores may be automated, to include adapting page formats and styles, and prepping editions and contents for testing or publishing.
Why do many fall short of the mark?
Every leading publishing system offers automated features and workflows, but few pursue a strategy as comprehensive as the Unified Publishing Process (UPP). Some systems settle for select subprocesses or simple status-based workflow control. The underlying concept is often far too inflexible and linear. However, for process control to be truly effective, the workflow has to be flexible enough to accommodate contingencies and facilitate management across the entire process chain, including all subprocesses. This is the only way to save time and money while freeing up resources better devoted to creative efforts.
Driven by creativity, passion and experience, vjoon persistently pursues the strategy behind the UPP. Print, Tablet, Web – vjoon K4 is all-in.
