A Curriculum for Cross-media Cataloging (912 words)

By Scott Shrake

A Curriculum for School Specialty Inc.'s operations integration begins with a course in digital content management for print and Web catalog production

Nationwide, teachers and school systems must equip classrooms with educational tools from globes and glue sticks to building blocks and Bunsen burners.

These educators might tip a collective cap to companies such as School Specialty Inc. (SSI), an Appleton, WI-based distributor of non-textbook school supplies and furniture for pre-kindergarten through secondary education.

SSI offers more than 66,000 products to schools throughout the country using print and online catalogs. Having grown considerably through acquisition, the company currently comprises three divisions, reports Laura Bruck, vice president of marketing for Frey Educational Resources, a division of SSI.

One division operates as School Specialty, which markets general school supplies and furniture. About 1 million copies of the four-color, 900-page School Specialty catalog are printed each year. SSI's Sax Arts & Crafts Division specializes in art supplies and distributes a four-color, 500-page print catalog, as well as some ancillary catalogs.

The third division, Frey Educational Resources, produces four catalog titles for a total annual print run of about 600,000. They are:

• Frey Scientific, featuring 816 pages of products for use in secondary science education.

• Brodhead Garrett, a 624-page industrial education tools catalog.

• Frey Elements, with 164 pages of math, science and technology resources for elementary schools.

• Frey Explorer, an 88-page catalog of secondary school-level math, science and technology resources.

Each print catalog appears annually. SSI has also created online versions of some titles, accessible at SSI's Web site, www.junebox.com.

Getting IT Together

While each division has its own product focus and marketing channels, SSI seeks to integrate the three divisions by developing and leveraging an extensible IT (information technology) infrastructure, including shared business, content management, production and fulfillment systems.

In 1999, SSI invested in the B•media digital content management solution from Banta Integrated Media of Cambridge, MA, to form part of that infrastructure. B•media is designed to facilitate content management and cross-media production workflow automation, ultimately for all of SSI.

B•media components include a Content Manager, which provides asset management; Product Manager, which furnishes a central view of product info and related content; and Administration Manager, for security and storage configuration. B•commerce (for e-commerce) and B•distinct (for one-to-one marketing) are added plug-ins.

Frey Educational Resources utilized B•media in 1999 to produce the print and online versions of its Frey Scientific catalog, as well as the ink-on-paper-only Frey Elements catalog. The School Specialty and Sax Arts & Crafts divisions used B•media to deliver content to their Web publishing software for e-commerce catalogs. All titles are expected to leverage B•media this year.

Then and Now

Frey Educational Resources has a five-person in-house graphics department responsible for the division's four catalog titles. Prior to using B•media, Frey's product/merchandising managers would create a mock-up of each catalog for the graphics department. The managers had to enter new copy for every edition, and cut-and-paste the dummy together using a labor-intensive manual process. Graphics then used the mock-up as a model to produce the actual catalog in QuarkXPress.

Using the content management solution in 1999 for Frey Elements and Frey Scientific catalogs, product/merchandise managers entered copy into the B•media database. In 2000, managers need only update the information in the database, rather than input all new text, as had been done previously.

Now, the managers retrieve the text and low-res images from the database to build a catalog structure that can be imported into the QuarkXPress layout using the B•mediaXT QuarkXTension. The graphics department simply refines the layout and prepares the files for production. Prepress vendor Flying Color Graphics, a Pontiac, IL-based company owned by Applied Graphics Technologies (AGT) swaps in the high-res images for printing at Banta's Menasha, WI, plant.

For Web publishing, the same content blocks and elements are exported from the B•media database or XPress pages to SSI's Web and e-commerce software.

The B•media database is linked electronically to the company's business system. Pricing updates made in the business system are automatically reflected in XPress pages using the B•media XT QuarkXTension (with Meadows Information Systems' Autoprice XTension).

Reaping the Rewards

B•media has helped Frey reduce production cycle time, facilitate content repurposing and cross-media production automation and eliminate redundancy, Bruck says. "It's hard to quantify on the print side now, but B•media really streamlined the e-commerce process," she comments. "We'll really see the difference next year. We have all our basic information in place; we could start working on our next catalog today.

"Whereas once we had to set up an item in Quark, then repeat the process for e-commerce and in our business system, we just enter the information once, and it's all linked," she adds. B•media also provides a central repository for Frey's low-res images, approximately 3,000 for the four titles, 75 percent of which are reused from year to year.

"Every catalog will be in B•media by year's end," she says. "We have separate databases for each title now—we can can log on to others but can't transfer data between them. Since there is some redundancy of images between titles, we might link the databases next year."

After all its divisions are on board, SSI plans to extend B•media beyond just catalog production.

"We hope to utilize B•media as a centralized information and communications resource for the entire company, including CSRs," Bruck reveals.

B•media will also serve as an integral tool for brand and color management, she predicts.