Improving Production Processes and Analysing Tracking System Requirements

Ixxus helped this UK standards organisation identify opportunities to improve speed-to-market for their core products and understand the technology options for production tracking and content management.

The Client

This organisation is the national standards body of the UK and develops and sells standards and standardisation solutions to meet the needs of business and society. This organisation produces about 2,000 new or revised British, European or International standards each year.

The Challenge

This organisation faced the twin challenges of reducing time-to-market for key publications and managing and reporting on the progress of large numbers of products through complex production workflows. They needed to understand where the current processes could be improved to speed up production, and what a proposed tracking system should provide to support the production workflows, and manage content files and product information.

Our Approach

Our business consultant teamed up with one of our senior information systems architects to facilitate a series of process and requirements workshops with the different production teams. This enabled us to map and analyse the organisation’s current production processes for a range of different product lines, identify key workflow issues, and compile a detailed business and functional requirements specification for the content management and tracking system.

We went on to evaluate a shortlist of technologies as potential software solutions for the tracking system − by assessing their degree of fit with the functional requirements and their technical suitability for integration with existing internal systems, and identify likely high-level costs of software and implementation.

Solution

As a result of our expertise and experience in publishing production we were able to identify 12 key recommendations for improving processes at this organisation, all targeted to reduce time-to-market. We also provided a comparative assessment of three alternative technologies for the tracking system, based on OpenText LiveLink, Flatirons Solutions Pubfusion, and Alfresco ECM.

Results

This organisation are rolling out many of Ixxus’ key recommendations for process improvement, and are planning to implement a production tracking system in a later phase.