Case Studies

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Workflow Transformation for Large Professional Standards Organization

Apex has partnered with one of the world’s leading standards organizations to transform their publication process, resulting in an end-to-end solution combining best-of-breed technologies and services that dramatically reduces time to publication, streamlines the editorial process, and provides print and electronic products along with robust and dynamic electronic archives.

The new workflow will enable the authors, editors, and thousands of subject matter experts to contribute and collaborate electronically, creating a continually evolving but rigorously managed master file that will be kept up to date and published rapidly.  In addition to reducing costs significantly, the new workflow enables this critical technical information to be published within days or weeks of approval, rather than months.

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Streamlining and Automating Business Information Management and Distribution

Apex is working with a high-quality publisher of scholarly content to dramatically streamline the process by which they collect, manage, and disseminate editorial and production information.  Formerly characterized by scores of “information silos”—typically Word and Excel files maintained individually and manually—this publisher’s information management workflow will be transformed into a press-wide database consolidating information about prospective titles, books in the production, and published titles.  The new system will integrate editorial, production, scheduling, and marketing information to dramatically reduce redundancy and inconsistency, cutting their information management burden to less than half the time and effort previously required, while improving accuracy, accessibility, and timeliness of that information.

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Cost and Cycle Time Reduction and Value Enhancement for Book Publisher

Apex partnered with a large commercial publisher of scholarly and reference books to develop a redesigned workflow that would provide the basis for increasing revenue while reducing costs.  The resulting end-to-end editorial and composition workflow enabled copyediting to be done easily by freelancers, allowed books to be individually designed, and provided consistent, robust XML archives—all while significantly improving quality, tripling capacity, and reducing costs over 18%.  And now, virtually all of the hundreds of books produced in this workflow are delivered weeks ahead of schedule.