Major National Newspaper Automates Indexing
Using Taskmaster To Improve Advertiser Customer Service
A leading media and publishing company, with revenues over $3 billion, publishes several international newspapers and many other regional daily newspapers.
The Challenge
The company's advertising customers make advertising decisions on a daily basis on five and sometimes six-figure commitments. Many of these commitments are made over the telephone. To properly document these fast-paced transactions, most advertisers are required to fax in an Insertion Order that includes all the terms of the advertising placement.
Before Taskmaster was installed in the late 1990s, insertion orders were scanned into an aging imaging system that required the physical paper insertion order. With an average of 300 to 400 orders a day, some up to six pages in length, they were creating a significant document management challenge. "Not only were we running out of room to store orders," explains a Production Manager in the Advertising Department. "But the time spent storing and retrieving these orders was costly and occasionally orders were even were lost."
The Solution
To streamline the entire process, the company upgraded their system with Datacap Taskmaster, integrated with a Böwe Bell and Howell® Sidekick 1400 scanner. Taskmaster is also integrated with the newspaper's internally-developed Ad Portal Software, which tracks all advertising orders. Each insertion order has a unique barcode on it, which is captured by Taskmaster and used as the index value for the order and delivered with the order document image to the Ad Portal Software for easy retrieval.
One aspect of the process highlights Taskmaster's value as a solution with built-in flexibility. When a customer orders an advertisement, the order is assigned a reservation number when Sales enters the order into the system. When the order is received via fax, Advertising Production prints out a unique barcode label which includes the reservation number. While Production does their best to put this label in a standard position on the order, the high volume of orders and the pace that they are arrive results in some inconsistencies in the location of the bar code.
Taskmaster's flexible field-finding capabilities, combined with the ability to leverage the Sidekick's double-sided scanning capability, ensure that the barcode value is accurately captured, no matter where it's located on the order. The reservation number is then associated with the order document image that Taskmaster delivers to the Ad Portal system for easy retrieval.
The Result
Working in concert, Datacap Taskmaster and the Böwe Bell and Howell® Sidekick scanner significantly reduces the effort required to record and file the paper Insertion Orders, freeing up time and space. As a result, the storage and retrieval of insertion orders has been streamlined and accuracy is increased throughout the process, maintaining high customer satisfaction for the company's advertisers.