Magazine Group's Workflow Enables 10-Fold Growth

Mortons Media Group in the UK, specialists in heritage transport magazines, has installed Picdar's Media Mogul workflow system.

Mortons Media Group in the UK, specialists in heritage transport magazines, has installed Picdar's Media Mogul workflow system.

Andrew Savage, production manager at Mortons, said: "Within only a few months from implementation we experienced a quantum leap in time and cost savings in production management, happier editorial teams and a 10-fold growth in syndication." Doug Shaw, ICT manager from Mortons will be explaining how Media Mogul has helped the company to eliminate hidden costs by streamlining its publishing workflows at Publishing Expo at Olympia in London on April 27.

Media Mogul is said to be a flexible workflow system developed by Picdar.

The company believes the system's introduction marks a step-change in the way that any publisher can now organise and control its production workflow.

Lesley Steinitz, the chief executive officer of Picdar, said: "Media Mogul Workflow allows publishers to concentrate on the business of producing and selling excellent content.

It introduces long overdue cost efficiencies in to the magazine production process without diminishing any of the joys of publishing." With Picdar's system, Mortons now enjoys a common workflow throughout the production process from input of text and images to print ready output.

Andrew Savage commented: "With Media Mogul I can see the status of the whole magazine, how ready it is and the location of any blockage." Because Media Mogul ties all of the published content together, its installation has had a positive impact on growing interest in Mortons syndication and web publishing businesses, said the company.

Production lead times are now accurate and make it possible to acquire, expand and innovate with new magazines, said Mortons.

Savage added: "We added eight new titles and six one-shots over 2005.

All came in easily.

At even a rough estimate, because we've not had to increase staffing levels, we've almost doubled our output whilst maintaining our base-line costs." Picdar's workflow system maintains the idiosyncrasies of individual team working practices whilst providing a resilient and scaleable meta-structure for the control of assets, said the company.

Users can now find the right material faster than in the past.

Savage further commented: "One of the many benefits of unifying our working practices with Media Mogul is that it is now possible for people to jump from one magazine to another and start working immediately." With Picdar's Quark XTensions, users at Mortons can drive the system from within the Quark application but with the confidence that version control of each asset, page and issue is handled automatically by Media Mogul.

Media Mogul is also available with In-Design XTensions.

An element of Picdar's technology is E-Loader, which strips attachments out of emails and loads them immediately in to Media Mogul.

Without this, someone has to waste a few minutes exporting and loading each piece of content emailed in to the organisation, said Picdar.

Over the course of a week, that soon adds up to many wasted working hours.

Currently Mortons publishes three or four magazines each week and the company is looking at further expansion.

Savage explained: "We can expand the system at very little cost.

It is just a matter of disk space to allow us to buy the next group of magazines.

The most impressive benefit of using Media Mogul is that we can publish much more without having to increase the number of staff.".

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