SUCCESS STORY
(Mitsumura Publishing Company)
Textbook publishing made efficient with Enterprise
Results & benefits
- Unparalleled level of collaboration internally and with external contributors.
- The editors can focus on content creation again.
- Highly efficient revision process with significant time savings.
About the customer
The Mitsumura Publishing Company in Japan has been publishing textbooks for elementary, junior high and high school levels since 1949, when the company was founded. For more than sixty years, the publisher's operational strength and passion has always been to think from a children's perspective, to discover and create innovative and fun learning materials that naturally encourage their learning abilities. In recent years, the company has also been developing digital textbooks.
In the past we lost two or three days to just make one revision, because we outsourced all typesetting to an external service provider. That is just one of many steps we have taken out of the workflow, which has become flexible and efficient.
Challenges
The legacy workflow posed numerous challenges – the editors were overburdened with administrative and logistic tasks. Collaboration with external users in the workflow was difficult. In general, the editorial and publishing processes were complicated and error-prone. As a result, efficiency was low and the high quality standards at risk.
Evaluation
The publisher decided to search for a powerful workflow system to significantly increase process efficiency. The system should allow to discharge the editors of administrative and logistic tasks so they can refocus on creating the educational content again. It should also enable easy collaboration internally as well with various external partners. Tomoko Nishimura, Vice Editor-in-Chief of the production department at Mitsumura, saw WoodWing Enterprise at a trade show and quickly became confident that the system was the best solution for the company.
WoodWing's publishing system Enterprise enabled us to improve the intellectual productivity of our editors.
Implementation / Integration
The implementation was executed by Visual Processing Japan, WoodWing's Authorized Solution partner in the country. The designers are using InDesign to create the layouts on the server. Then the editors leverage InCopy to insert the text. This way, all parties can work simultaneously on the master file, further reducing workflow complexity.
Results & benefits
- Enterprise is the main workflow system for editing and producing all textbooks and supplementary reading materials.
- This system is used by more than one hundred users – not just from Mitsumura's own editorial department, but also from their subcontracting partners.
- Soon after the full-scale implementation of Enterprise, Mitsumura achieved positive workflow effects.
- The new production environment enabled the publisher to tap significant time savings, the workflow has become flexible and efficient.
- Progress management has improved dramatically too – the editors can now check the latest progress status on the server via their web browser.
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