The client had experienced average annual growth of 25% over the previous seven years. This was accomplished primarily by introducing new and innovative online products to their customers. Carpedia was engaged by the executive team to help further accelerate growth by “fostering continuous improvement.”
With several development projects running concurrently, the team was struggling to coordinate activities of individuals. As a result, products were routinely released late, and capacity no longer existed to further accelerate growth.
The Editorial Operations group is responsible for sourcing and uploading content on an ongoing basis. Studies revealed that many issues existed in the various processes that were causing lost time. Due to vendor quality issues, there were additional activities that needed to be performed in house. The challenge was to take on these activities with minimal growth to the employee base.
The Solutions
The following changes were implemented:
- Centralized Planning & Scheduling department has been set up.
- Comprehensive project team approach to cross departmental projects.
- Project Sponsor is assigned to each project to represent the interests of the customer.
- “Iterative” approach to project scheduling has been adopted.
- “Release When Ready” methodology has been employed.
- Troubleshooting guide was established for common run errors.
- Work teams were established to cross train operators.
- Training documentation was developed for set up procedures.
- Searching for missing issues in Serials and Pub Data has been reduced.
- Training has been performed in Scanning on QC standards to reduce rescans.
- Work is assigned using a skills matrix in Abstracting & Indexing to capitalize on employee knowledge base.
The Results
- An integrated methodology has been created for development projects in technology and services
- Production is tracking at 45% reduction in late databases
- Editorial Operations is tracking at 44% improvement in productivity
