System selection

With dozens of publishing systems suppliers in the market, it’s truly tough for you to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of companies and their products. Hundreds – maybe thousands – of staff hours can be consumed by the process of finding the supplier that’s right for your publication.

The Cole Group is here to help. With decades of publishing system selection experience, we can cut through the confusion and point you at a small group of companies that can meet your needs.

Cole Group consultants and analysts visit many newspapers each year, seeing many installations of brand-new products. Our staff visits every pre-press exhibitor at the Newspaper Association of America’s NEXPO, and we comb other trade shows as well – Seybold, Macworld, America East, America West.

Through it all, The Cole Group remains independent – we do not offer our services to suppliers. Nor are we in the business of providing cookie-cutter solutions – each publication is unique. It’s only after we have evaluated your environment that we make a recommendation, certain that it is right for you.

Preliminary analysis

Our system selection process starts off with a two- or three-day visit to your offices, to evaluate existing workflow and system usage.

Whether it is an editorial front-end, a classified system, pre-press in general or a database environment (business, circulation or asset management), we track the way your staff uses your existing equipment.

We talk with staffers – managers and line workers – about how they do their jobs, and the ways they’d like technology to help improve their performance.

At the end of the preliminary analysis, your Cole Group consultant will provide you with an hour-long oral report to give you a sense of what we have discovered. Upon returning to our offices, your consultant will prepare a written report detailing everything uncovered. David M. Cole will review your report, providing his perspective, based on his decades of experience as a publishing systems expert.

Workflow reengineering

Often in this multimedia age, our preliminary analysis will find that a publication needs to reevaluate its workflow.

We approach workflow reengineering from a unique perspective: We believe you and your staff know more about the right way to publish in your environment than anyone else. Thus, our approach to changing your workflow is to help you determine that right way, born of your operation and staff.

We have two primary methods for workflow reengineering:

• Using the techniques we call Solution Search, we create an intensive working environment with your key players off-site over a three-day period. The goal: Determine how best to organize your publication for the future. Under our guidance, your staffers reveal the truths about how to achieve previously unknown efficiencies in your operation. The product of this session is a document that will show you how to reorganize your publication’s workflow.

• We assist you in writing your own workflow document. We need not be on-site for this task, which is usually quite long (needing months rather than days). Using e-mail, we work with your key people in creating the document which then can be a blueprint for your future.

As well as charting your future operations, the workflow reengineering document serves as the basis for determining which suppliers can meet your needs in the future.

Supplier selection

Whether your workflow needs to be changed to meet the future or not, you’ll face a daunting number of companies who could supply a given system.

Because we don’t recommend specific suppliers (we do help you stay away from the ones who won’t do a good job for you), The Cole Group will work with you to winnow the long list of potential suppliers down to a manageable group of three to five names.

We do not believe in Requests for Proposal (RFPs). Instead, we think a supplier should be able to read your workflow analysis document and tell you how it would meet your needs.

We can help you organize site visits at publications now using the systems of your potential suppliers, working with both the supplier and the site to make your visit productive and pleasant. Optionally, your Cole Group consultant can travel with you to these sites, to help you evaluate the systems and to give you background on what you’ve seen.

Purchasing process and implementation

The Cole Group has extensive experience in the acquisition of publishing systems. We can be a resource during the purchasing process, assisting in price negotiations or reviewing proposed contracts.

With years of background in installing publishing systems, The Cole Group can provide on-site project implementation management or periodic visits for course-correction during the installation.

The goal of The Cole Group is to achieve the greatest benefits and efficiencies from your new system for you.

System selection | General management | Cole’s courses | Solution search