Success Story - Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft

Challenges

The customer's workflows in book publishing are very image-driven – for each book the team has to handle up to 500 images. The time needed to find the right images was enormous, and their management was a consuming process. Furthermore, existing images often went lost, and the team had to recreate or purchase them again.

Evaluation

The company is a long-term user of WoodWing's multi-channel publishing system WoodWing Studio (previously called Enterprise) to create magazines, books and more. To further reduce costs and significantly improve efficiency, the customer decided to implement a powerful digital asset management system that can seamlessly cooperate with the WoodWing Studio publishing system. The DAM system should help to reduce the number of lost images, and to optimize the handling of duplicates by leveraging the systems metadata options and category features. The server should run on Linux. After a comprehensive presentation by WoodWing's partner a&f systems gmbh, Hannover (Germany), Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft selected WoodWing Assets.

Initially, the team only thought about a simple image archive. The editors and designers recognized more and more the potential of the integration of WoodWing Studio and WoodWing Assets and now leverage the possibilities.

 

Mirco Albusberger, CIO at a&f systems gmbh

Implementation / Integration

The implementation of WoodWing Assets ran smoothly and was completed in just a few days. WoodWing's partner mediafluxx supported a&f systems during the process. a&f systems has developed a plug-in for WoodWing Assets, calculating the possible size of the images in print depending on the resolution already when importing the image. Thus, the prepress and production departments can quickly see whether the images meet the requirements.

Results & benefits

• In the combined environment of WoodWing Studio and WoodWing Assets, the Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft now creates its wide range of books in a highly efficient manner.
• Management, quality assurance and pre-selection of images for book projects are now done directly in WoodWing Assets.
• The images are grouped into collections when needed and exported for transfer to Enterprise.
• They can be used across departments and copyrights are clearly defined in the metadata.
• In the era before WoodWing Assets, images often went lost and the team had to recreate or repurchase them – this has been reduced significantly.
• In addition to direct cost savings, many hours spent researching and transferring images can be saved.