El Pais - Spain

For many daily newspapers, the almost unattainable daily production deadlines are the stuff nightmares are made of. Since the introduction of CaslonFlow at El Pais, Spain’s largest newspaper however, things have changed. Staff no longer fear their complex, time-critical daily production schedules. Their nightmares of frantic last-minute trouble shooting efforts have become but a distant dream…

With an average daily circulation of 470,000 copies, the production team at El País needs every minute it can spare. Managing the complex, time-critical production process at this mammoth daily newspaper is a task best left to those with nerves of steel.
José Luis Alegre, Head of New Technologies at El País, puts it in no uncertain terms: “Time is a luxury we just don’t have. To reach our output target, we need to use every second of every day – day after day without fail. Our challenge: to gain greater supervisory control over the workflow, while ensuring error-free production under tight deadlines.”

CaslonFlow, the state-of-the-art automation tool from Gradual Software lived up to the challenges and demands of El País’ daily production schedule.

Workflow administration made simple

The production process at El País involves integrating a variety of data, from photos and text to advertising content, delivered from multiple sources (such as FTP sites and email) and from users in different locations. The challenge: to gain greater supervisory control over the workflow, while ensuring error-free production under tight deadlines.
CaslonFlow proved to be an easily installed automation solution that visually links up existing software applications and facilitates file transfers between FTP sites or remote locations. Built-in tools support a variety of automatable functions, such as compression and decompression of files, uploading or downloading files from FTP servers, email notification and load balancing.

José Luis Alegre explains the reasons why CaslonFlow proved the perfect solution for El País: “Prior to implementing CaslonFlow, our production team was involved in ongoing trouble-shooting in order to manage the complex and time critical production schedule. Since installing ten licenses for CaslonFlow, operators have gained greater administrative control over the entire production process, resulting in increased time-savings and efficiency. We see fewer work duplications and a significantly better output quality, which is motivating to our production team and saves us all a lot of time, hassle and of course, unnecessary costs!”

Workflow administration made simple 470,000 happy readers!

El País never fails its readers. Every day, it delivers a trusted copy of their favorite newspaper to media outlets, corner stores and cafés across the country.
With daily deadlines at El País fast approaching, CaslonFlow works to ensure that files quickly reach their correct destination. The setup process was simple – CaslonFlow contains a toolkit of automated sequences called “Flows”. By connecting applications via configurators, hot folders or scripts, and then automatically moving files between them, CaslonFlow ensures that every action takes the minimum amount of time. Every flow is customized to the specific needs of the newspaper, making every second count where and when it matters most.

CaslonFlow works with any application that supports hot folders and provides ready-made configurators for Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat Professional, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) and applications that work with PDF (Enfocus PitStop Server, callas pdfInspektor, callas pdfCorrect, callas pdfColorConvert and Apago PDF Enhancer). Each configurator allows setup and automation of an external application directly from within CaslonFlow.
The result: an open standard workflow that facilitates fast, reliable client-to-company and third party communication.

Measuring return on investment

Time is money at a deadline-driven operation like El País and faster and more efficient production cycles offer convincing evidence that CaslonFlow was the right choice for problem-free automation. Error-free file delivery and clear communication between all internal and external parties in the production cycle have significantly reduced man-hours that used to be spent on troubleshooting.

“CaslonFlow has enabled us to gain administrative control over our production process in a way that was not possible before. The result is that the people involved in these processes have achieved a new level of operational control that has dramatically increased the quality and efficiency of our entire production cycle,” says José Luis Alegre.

“…As a matter of fact, this software is so flexible in its implementation possibilities that we are considering using CaslonFlow to automate functions in other areas of the company. This tool could easily be used to automate tasks in finance, purchasing or human resources. In fact, it can facilitate true cross-departmental integration!” concludes Alegre, the man with a vision of what this technology can do for the company, thoughtfully.

Credits

This testimonial was created in collaboration with Gradual Software’s Spanish distributor EPS (www.eps.es) and El País (www.elpais.es).

PDF Version

Download the printable PDF version of this testimonial here: download (PDF).