Digital asset management and workflow solutions in action
How TUI streamlined publishing processes for its Thomson holiday brochures and websites, and delivered huge cost savings
All change, but business as usual
"Content is King" became a tired old clich� during the heady days of the dotcom boom, but it still holds that quality content can make a real difference to a business in terms of driving productivity and profits. And for businesses that run on conveying information to sell products, content is critical - whether it's online or not.
For any organisation whose business relies on selling tools like brochures and websites to reach customers, an effective content management strategy is vital - and key to this is the need to consolidate everything that may be construed as content and have it available from a central source.
One company which has whole heartedly embraced this approach is Thomson Holidays. Thomson Holidays is a division of TUI UK, the UK's largest air-inclusive tour operator and part of TUI AG, the world's leading tourism service company. The head office is in London, but the majority of its employees work overseas. The company has about one third of the UK market and operates to a wide range of resorts offering a variety of holiday types to suit all ages and tastes.
The benefits & spin-offs resulting from the introduction of Media Mogul:
� Repro costs removed
� Simultaneous brochure/web deployment
� Staff retention became less of an issue as a lot of the laborious work used under the old system vanished
� More accuracy in the brochures now everything is automated
� Quicker production cycles
� Brochures on CD
� New holiday products easily created and sold
� Images immediately available for the press
The importance of content �
To sell holiday packages TUI relies heavily on brochures - and an ever-growing internet presence (plus new on-line publishing platforms) meant change was necessary. TUI therefore undertook a major business initiative, incorporating IT solutions, aimed at automating the production and deployment of content for both. This has delivered huge flexibility and business benefits with substantial cost savings.
Brochures are TUI's main selling tool and a huge amount of effort goes into producing them. Traditionally, TUI carried out the majority of the publishing work in-house but used a repro house to convert low-res quark pages to high-res files for print. For practical reasons this meant having huge amounts of images physically off-site, which was costly and prevented TUI from making full use of its content outside brochures.
There was no media neutral content repository, and the Quark pages were still the most accurate record of what had been published.
The challenge �
This became a problem when the content team was called upon to repurpose its content for a variety of New Media initiatives. Immediately before automation of the process, it could take up to four weeks from brochure publication to get the same material online.
Finding images was especially cumbersome. In order to work out which images had been used it was necessary to interrogate the original Quark brochure page and pull off the image code, which then had to be matched manually with a low-res version of the image held locally in a folder hierarchy on a Mac Server.
These low res images were not suitable for publishing on the web, so the repro house had to create them specially, a service for which TUI incurred further costs.
The problem with editorial content was different. Of course, this content has to be 100% accurate. While TUI already had an editorial content database, the pressures of late changes to brochure content meant that these were often applied directly in the Quark brochure pages and the database would be updated later.
Before the content team could publish this information to the web they had to ensure any late changes were updated in the database. Additionally, some information added only on the brochure page had to be input before this database was published to the web.
Delivering cross media publishing �
The TUI challenge, therefore, was getting to the point where they had easy access to all their content in-house and the flexibility to publish content to one or many channels from one central repository. They needed to find a solid platform to build this idea on and all this had to be achieved while continuing to support business as usual.
Content management, particularly on the web, came as first priority. An additional challenge was moving from the traditional brochure publishing environment and re-defining processes to enable the team to also support new media initiatives.
Clearly, TUI needed a technology which could manage the crossover between traditional publishing (using Quark XPress) and the web. It needed to comprehensively manage text and images together. An effective Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution was required to integrate with a newly developed in-house content management system, called EPIC.
TUI wanted an off-the-shelf DAM system that was proven yet flexible and could be made to fit their requirements, rather than accept the way a particular package worked. A key requirement, for example, was the ability to interface with EPIC.
Enter Media Mogul from Picdar, which was selected with the urgent objective of supporting new media initiatives, in the knowledge that it would later be integrated into the traditional publishing environment. It was seen as a strategic tool initially geared towards reducing the time it took brochure content to be deployed on line.
Media Mogul enabled TUI to bring all their high-res images in-house, giving it the flexibility to have them in whatever format was required and to publish them over and over again. These images were also then available to other areas of the business. Lunnpoly.com was the first of the group websites to benefit from this new initiative when it launched.
Having successfully met the requirements for web repurposing, the task of automating the brochure production cycle started to take priority.
On these solid foundations TUI began a programme designed to totally automate brochure production, to centralise and drive all content from EPIC, and implement a PDF workflow while providing simultaneous content delivery to their various websites.
Flexibility and Control�
TUI continually review their product offer. Greater flexibility and the ability to work to tighter deadlines are becoming more and more important, and Media Mogul plays a vital role in supporting this. It holds over 60,000 images, maps, logos, graphics and brochure pages, and is fully integrated with TUI's own EPIC content management system.
Media Mogul now holds all the master images, logos and graphics in a format suitable for print, together with all the spatial and colour data needed to feed into traditional print processes. The move to digital photography means new images can now go directly into Media Mogul, removing the need for scanning. Other versions of these images suitable for browsing, page make-up and website use are all created automatically.
Each one of these digital "assets" is cross referenced with relevant descriptive information, specific hotel and resort information, and details about the approval status of the image. For a tour operator, it is of course vital to know exactly what each picture relates to - is a particular hotel room a suite or an ordinary double, for instance? Has that hotel got a new swimming pool that wasn't shown in the picture used last year?
Free text and structured searching on any of this information means that users can locate up-to-date pictures very quickly and easily.
Self sufficient and automated �
The brochure production system at TUI is Quark based, drawing automatically on the structured content held in EPIC and Media Mogul. Page make-up uses the low res files from Media Mogul, and the low-res to high-res image swapping required for the final stage of brochure production is done using Media Mogul and one of Picdar's Quark XTensions. This replaces the need for OPI and enables TUI to be self-sufficient in this key aspect of their business.
Today, the final brochure outputs are high resolution PDFs which go direct to the printer. At the same time content is exported to Quark and pre-tagged XML can be deployed to the websites from EPIC. Simultaneous publishing to web and print is a reality now for TUI.
Low resolution PDFs of brochure pages are produced for reference. These feed back into Media Mogul, where they link up automatically with their component images. This structure allows TUI to find the images which were used on a particular page of a particular edition - and to identify all the places where an image or logo was used. This is an automatic by-product of the new integrated system, and means that changes are carefully audited and gives TUI an immediate reference to every page of every edition of every brochure. This is an invaluable tool in a business where being able to audit the accuracy of every page of every brochure is of paramount importance!
Doing more, for less �
The business benefits of all this have been huge and surprisingly not all financial. TUI has achieved very significant six figure repro cost savings but there have been other major improvements as well.
A more automated process has led directly to a reduction in the amount of time it takes to produce brochures, with production staff able to create pages more efficiently. This means the page production process can start later, allowing more time to finalise content and incorporate any necessary changes before pages are produced.
All this points to a rapid financial payback simply on the historical brochure production activities, while at the same time delivering content for the web, now an essential tool in TUI's sales armoury.
Because it's possible � �
Having all content together in one place has not only allowed TUI the ability to simultaneously publish to paper and web, but also to offer more online. For example, flexible packages made up of low-cost flights and accommodation offered via the Britannia Airways website. The material for these offers comes from several brochures and is packaged together specifically for Britannia.
Then there are new ways of selling holidays. TUI has launched "the web's best low cost holiday company", www.BudgetHolidays.com. The content initiative provides all product information for the venture.
Not only that, but there is the idea of having brochures on CD and making these available to travel agents. Why? Because some customers prefer this, and it saves on enormous print and postage costs, particularly for the huge Summer Sun brochure. The repository of PDF files makes this task easy.
So successful has the whole project been that TUI is already planning a further phase designed to fully exploit the power of Media Mogul. Coming next is a
web interface that will allow images stored in Media Mogul to be made available to staff in both UK and worldwide locations.
Improving quality � �
In addition, staff will be able to search for and download images. Effective cataloguing of images is also expected to bring improvements within the publishing process giving the staff access to a wider variety of images. The integration of Media Mogul and EPIC will give UK and resort users the ability to easily review and approve all images held in the database. Verified images will be easily identifiable and approval dates recorded, clearly indicating to Publishing staff which images are OK to publish.
It is planned that photographers and resort staff will be able to submit digital images directly to Media Mogul instead of sending CDs or emailing photography to the Publishing team in the UK.
A web-based system will also help with publicity by having images immediately available for magazines and newspapers. At the moment, a full time administrator is fulfilling requests for images. With the new web system, TUI users will be able to search, select and dispatch images themselves.
After launching these business initiatives everything is almost in place, and right at the heart of it, supporting the EPIC content management system, is Media Mogul. You don't always see it, but it's always there acting as an enabling mechanism for TUI to work more efficiently and to support the business in ways not thought possible beforehand.
Not that getting this system implemented was as quick and easy as it sounds. Instead of going for a total solution all at the same time TUI adopted a measured approach, bringing all essential elements of their new way of working on-stream gradually.
The big picture � �
They were careful not to go into too much detail to start with, preferring to set out the big picture and cost expectations first. They then proceeded slowly, with each stage of the process being implemented and reviewed before moving onto the next and working on the basis of building upon previous achievements first.
Now at the end of a long journey TUI has a solution in place they can be proud of, which is saving them a huge amount of money in the process. The driving force behind the whole project was re-gaining control - and by bringing everything in-house they have done this in spectacular style.
Media Mogul from Picdar has played a huge part in this change, being directly responsible for removing the overheads associated with conventional repro. TUI can now publish to more platforms with fewer people, a lot less effort and at vastly reduced cost, all because they had the foresight of investing wisely in a product that delivered everything it promised.
Picdar would like to express their thanks to Ali Jarman and Cate Dixon of TUI UK Ltd for their contributions in producing this case study.
Quotes: Ali Jarman, Content Manager, TUI UK
�We were spending significant six figure sums annually with our repro house to convert our low-res Quark pages to print. All of these costs have now been removed.�
Ali Jarman, Content Manager, Tui UK
“Picdar’s Media Mogul® did exactly what we wanted it to and covered our requirements very comprehensively...“
“We were very impressed by the people and the presentation we saw and felt that they were a good, secure, forward-thinking company that would instantly ‘fit’ with us culturally.”
