Shortening time-to-market and fostering automated processing.

April 2009  Gent, Belgium  TUI Nederland, Dutch market leader in the Dutch travel market, has invested in Enfocus Switch to streamline their production process. Achieving its goal of organizing automated processing, TUI can now shorten the production time to produce high quality holiday catalogues.

Jos Roozenbeek, responsible for designing publishing and printing processes at TUI Nederland, produces large volumes of travel catalogues every year. This is quite a challenge, as authoring and design occur at remote organizations that do not manage prepress and printing. Jobs flow downstream to the next stage in the production process in a variety of standard and non-standard file formats, generally with insufficient data to properly direct the process. By installing PowerSwitch at two production sites Mr. Roozenbeek was seeking ways to shorten time-to-market and to organize automated processes. Another important criterion was to more actively involve product managers in the production lifecycle. "We have integrated InDesign server and our planning system into the Switch environment," says Jos Roozenbeek, "We forward predefined InDesign documents to a certain project, generate the content, certify the PDF document, and redirect it to the several printing houses with whom we do business. This has become a fully automated process, so we gain quite a bit of time here."

Engaging product managers in the process

For TUI Nederland, it was of absolute priority to involve product managers in the production process of travel catalogues. The relationship network between the various participants in the approval cycle is usually very complex and differs depending on one's viewpoint. No single-purpose workflow system can provide a complete solution for this heterogeneous network. A new approach was required that supported step-by-step deployment of solutions across multiple participants in multiple organizations using a variety of systems and tools. Implementing Enfocus Switch made this possible.

Switch is designed to enable automation for everyday tasks in all areas of the publishing workflow--including creative design, editing and assembly--in addition to the actual final-stage production work. To achieve this, the automation backbone had to be easily configurable by the average system administrator or expert user, and it needed to interface with a large array of frequently used systems, tools and applications, including communication channels. The Enfocus Switch product family has been created with these objectives in mind. "Using Switch, we can involve our product managers, who are not technical, but commercial people. We include them in our entire production process, to help generate their products." says Jos Roozenbeek.

Reaping the benefits

"PowerSwitch is a key factor in the production of TUI travel catalogues," Roozenbeek confirms "It's easy to program PowerSwitch to fit into our production environment, allowing different processes to communicate and seamlessly work together. The PDF certification is being controlled and implemented via PowerSwitch. This makes it very easy to trace error messages. The production of travel catalogues is our primary objective, but we plan to integrate other processes as well, such as the in-house production of travel information booklets for our customers."

Crossroads  a winning concept

Crossroads forms an essential part of the Enfocus community that brings together a number of software vendors with their users around Enfocus Switch. It offers a seamless interface for products in publishing workflows which benefit from streamlined co-ordination. As a result, this reduces manual intervention, affecting time-savings and error reduction, both increasingly important within print and production environments for the publishing sector.

"Automation is based on certain industry standards, which has the benefit that you can combine different processes within one environment. The advantage of the Crossroads concept is that you can submit your problem to several people and discuss the various components with the vendors. Thus, Crossroads will lead us to new solutions." concludes Jos Roozenbeek.

About Switch

The Enfocus Switch family of automation-enabling software includes (entry-level LightSwitch, mainstream FullSwitch and advanced PowerSwitch), offering workflow automation opportunities for ad agencies, publishers and printers alike. With Switch, job processing becomes predictable even with complex flows, and the implementation of real job priorities allows fast-tracking jobs through a flow. Switch is optimizing the time it takes the first job to flow through a complete flow, enabling easy resource management for devices such as proofers and rips. Hot Folders, FTP and email-receive tools can be scheduled to automatically activate only in a predefined time window and are able to offer a "read-only" processing mode where the original jobs are left on the server and a copy is processed through the flow. Metadata support and scripting capabilities are available in PowerSwitch, offering, support for compression, database access and SOAP or web service communication directly from within Javascript.

The Enfocus family of Switch products allows simple configuration and automation of the workflow to incorporate and link third-party applications. Crossroads allows Enfocus users to analyze the efficiency of their workflow, vital to high-turnover environments with complex pagination and other specific requirements. Enfocus has developed configurators for Switch with popular applications from suppliers such as Adobe®, Alwan, Callas, EFI, Elpical, Markzware, PerfectProof, Quite, Ultimate and more.

About TUI Nederland

TUI Nederland is the name behind the brands Arke, Holland International, KRAS, ROBINSON, Arke.nl, Lastminute.nl and is the market leader in the Dutch travel industry. TUI Nederland also owns airline company ArkeFly and includes 220 travel agencies Arke and Holland International Reisbureau, offering travel destinations all over the world. For its different brands TUI Nederland publishes 100 different titles of travel catalogues a year. TUI Nederland belongs to TUI Travel PLC, an international leisure travel group.