Pre-Press -- End-to-end solutions for Academic and Professional Publisher in Australia |
Client profile:
Our client was an academic and professional publisher based in Australia who was a well known and hugely respected provider of books for the educational sector.
Business challenge:
This client wanted us at Quick Sort, to work out a 360 degrees project management solution for a project. Now, 360 degrees project management is a way of working which includes author/ publisher/printer/online liaison apart from copyediting and typesetting. Added to this challenge was another one which consisted of migrating the existing journals in Quark platform to an Indesign platform, necessitated by the adoption of new styles and design. Quick Sort being vastly experienced in handling such projects was awarded the project after necessary sampling and verification by the client.
Quick Sort Solution:
When the first batch of journal articles came to us from the publisher, we understood the magnitude of the challenge. Many inconsistent styles had been adopted in the proofs and hence the resulting PDF output was in bad shape. We alerted the publisher immediately regarding these inconsistencies. While acknowledging that the facts presented by us were valid, the publisher expressed a desire to see things set right at the earliest, for some of the journal issues were due for publication immediately. Faced with an enormous task of setting things right within a short turnaround time, the editorial team of Quick Sort put in place some appropriate planning and began designing a style sheet with amazing speed and precision. Both the copyediting and typesetting teams set to work simultaneously on the project, one to look at the editorial points and the other to study the pagination aspects of the journal. Thus style sheets and templates were readied for the publisher's journals within a very short span of time.
One of the daunting tasks of the 360 degrees project management solution is the to-and-fro coordination required between Quick Sort and different authors so that the corrections/approval for the individual articles are finalised in time before the journal issues are published. Apart from author approved corrections, publisher corrections also need to be incorporated before the journal goes to press. Quick Sort managed to uniquely tackle the to-and-fro and communication issues by deploying qualified project managers and appropriate tracking software to monitor each and every article. The project managers took care of author and publisher liaison completely while the software took care of filtering, sorting and recording all correspondence received from the author/publisher. The updates were then communicated to the project managers so that they could keep track of the movement of articles. This reduced communication errors to such a large extent that Quick Sort came in for great appreciation from the client.
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Pre-Press -- Solution for Educational Publisher |
Client profile:
A leading educational publisher
Business challenge:
The client asked Quick Sort to create a subsequent reprint version of one of its prestigious projects. We were given only one month's time for the completion of the project from the job study stage to the preparation of printer ready files. There was absolutely no scope for extension of the deadline as the publisher had already committed a time deadline to the printer who would print the final version. As a consequence, marketing activities in this connection had already begun.
Quick Sort Solution:
The softcopy of the previous version had been supplied to us by the client with instructions to modify a few chapters and thereafter make ready a new version. An extensive job study brought to light the fact that the soft copy supplied to us was corrupted. On communicating the finding to the client, it was discovered that the soft copy version supplied to us was the only one in their possession and that the only way around the problem of the corrupted files was to work our way from the beginning with a hard copy version of the previous edition.
The above scenario came as a big shock to the publisher who almost gave up all hopes of his project getting through on schedule. However Quick Sort had an ace up its sleeve.
From the printed material, Quick Sort adopted a double-entry keying and comparison process; two different people typed the material, and then a third resolved discrepancies between the typed versions by referring to the original printed copy. The whole keying/comparison process was controlled by our proprietary software and followed by full proofreading to ensure accuracy levels of 99.995%. Copyediting for the newly added chapters was concurrently executed along with the images that were scanned and redrawn from the original book, and then typesetting was done exactly to match the previous edition format, and the project was completed well before the scheduled time. This endeavour drew not only hearty accolades from the publisher but also references and recommendations for Quick Sort to various other reputed publishers.
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Archival/Indexing solution for a Leading Bank in Chennai |
Client profile:
Our client, a popular Multinational bank located in Chennai, provides a host of products and services guaranteed to meet the needs of a global clientele. Some of the services include Personal Loans, Credit Cards, Online Banking Services, NRI Services, Insurance and Investments.
Business challenge:
The bank was dealing with a lot of cheque transactions on a day-to-day basis which involved allocation of a lot of resources for processing these transactions. In addition, there was the tedious task of assimilating information on the cheques and documenting the same. The challenges of rising cheque volumes coupled with escalating manpower/ infrastructure costs made the client consider other cost effective solutions and that is when Quick Sort India stepped in.
Quick Sort Solution:
Quick Sort's technique was simple. The cheques in hard copy were scanned to obtain a digital image. Using the sophisticated ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technique, information from the digital image was extracted and built into a database. The images were indexed and all the data is now available online for the client at the click of a button.
Benefits to the client
- The Digitization Process was completely controlled by a Workflow system, which took care to direct the user to the next process in the system
- High End Scanners were used to scan the images
- The scanned images were stored in the jpeg format which consumed less storage space
- The images were indexed and therefore can be retrieved at any time based on the user's request
- An online system was designed to browse through the images
- Quality and Correctness of the Data was verified by means of Quality Check Audits
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Digitization solution for a Leading Bank in Chennai |
Client profile:
Our client, a popular bank in Chennai, had been in operation since 1969. The bank was established with the main objective of rehabilitating repatriates from Burma and Srilanka and was governed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India.
Business challenge:
Thanks to the popularity of the various Deposit and Loan schemes introduced by the bank, their customer base increased in the South Indian states. This invariably caused an increase in the number of documents at the bank for the customers were required to submit various documents to avail the schemes offered by the bank. Storage of the numerous documents began to become a major problem with the documents beginning to occupy office space meant for operations. The problem was more serious because access and reference to these hard copy documents was a tedious and challenging proposition.
Quick Sort Solution:
Quick Sort's solution was to transform the tons of paper into meaningful data and present a paperless office. The hard copies of the documents were scanned and stored as images. These images were indexed and an online system was designed to access and browse through the documents. Further, access restrictions were also implemented for security reasons. The scope of the work extended to the digitization of the following Documents
- Loan Documents
- Customer's Personal Records
- Customer's Income Documents
- Customer's Mortgage Documents
- Other Records maintained by the Bank
The bank soon realized the advantages of making its offices paperless. About 15 Lakh paper documents were digitized at the customer's premises by Quick Sort.
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Epub Conversion solution for a leading educational service sector in the US |
Client profile:
A leading US based company which specializes in preservation and does custom publishing. This company also offers services that ensure access to a vast repository of scholarly information to nearly 1200 colleges and universities across the US.
Business challenge:
It was just a couple of weeks to the start of a new academic year and the company found to its dismay that the course packs for the students were well behind schedule and that the students would not be equipped to take on the challenges of the new academic year. The services of Quick Sort were solicited at this point to help tide over the crisis. As is its wont, Quick Sort stepped up to the plate.
Quick Sort Solution:
The task was daunting. About 75,000 pages needed to be converted within a month's time into a format compatible with the IPad and the turnaround time was just 24 hours for each course pack. Conversion, proof reading and quality check personnel were required in huge numbers to meet this challenge. Quick Sort set to work on surmounting the challenge and went all out to aggressively scout for talent in the respective areas. The important thing was to sift through the apparently large resource pool available and zero in on the best talent so that the work would meet with the highest quality standards. Tapping resources is an extremely challenging assignment and moreover, tapping the right resource is one which demands a skill out of the ordinary. However, as always, Quick Sort emerged from this situation with its head held high being able to respect not only the turnaround time but also the expected quality.
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