CyberCommand: Geac Publishing Systems utilizes CyberPage from its Media Command series of products to track page progress.

CRM (customer relationship management) is key to Geac

NEW ORLEANS -- Buzzword compliance is high on Bernard Grinberg's list, he said, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

"We look at CRM as the basis for all we do," he said. "But we build it on systems that read XML, run on SQL or Oracle. ..." His voice trailed off as product managers started to talk about delivering BMPs and PDFs via e-mail, using fat and thin clients, data warehouses and lookup tables, not to mention delivery of assignments, photos and stories via wireless and web-enabled PDAs.

For a company that is built out of four other companies, that's not surprising.

Grinberg was captain of the ship at Australia's Cybergraphic Inc. when he and his partners sold the company to Geac Computer Corp. Ltd. of Toronto. Shortly thereafter, Grinberg took over the publishing systems group based in Tampa, Fla., that already included Collier-Jackson, the venerable supplier of business and circulation systems. Cybergraphic brought editorial, classified and pagination to the mix.

Also added along the way were Matrix, a circulation system out of England and Gazette Technologies of Des Moines, Iowa, which contributed data warehousing and data mining tools.

Given the mix of companies and countries, buzzword compliance is probably necessary so the products and people can communicate. It's hard, with this many pieces, for most people to know where to start. Not Grinberg. For him, CRM -- customer relationship management -- is at the core of everything.

"CRM sits at top, at the prime user interface, and the customer is the focal point. From the customer base I can look at subscription records, complaining about the paper being late, or sell an ad," he said. "It's the front-end, where I can record all the actions taking place with a customer."

To do all this requires an industrial-strength database, which Grinberg says he has in Genera, the name the company has given to the large number of tables it has built to keep track of everything. Maintaining buzzword compliance, Genera is not a proprietary format, but a set of tables built in Oracle or Microsoft SQL, depending on a customer's needs and desires.

The editorial and advertising databases reside physically in one place, with log-in restrictions keeping the wrong eyes out; since everything lives in the database, everything can be seen from either a web browser or a fat client. And, of course, everything runs in the background on Windows NT servers.

For people who knew the original companies and their products, much of what was on the NEXPO floor was comfortingly familiar. Many of the updates happened under the covers, extending the capabilities of the previous systems and allowing them to work together. And though Geac now calls the broad product lineups by new names -- Sales Command, Media Command, Circulation Command and other commands as well -- the people manning the booth would immediately lapse back into the old names.

The editorial product, Media Command, has several modules. Layout Xpert is an outgrowth of the automated news layout program called Nails of several years back (see The Cole Papers, August 1996), and is based on the assumption that most inside pages at most newspapers allow limited flexibility in design. The system keeps track of the most commonly used designs, allowing users to call them up as templates and plop them in place to rapidly produce those pages with CyberPage, the new pagination tool.

Recognizing that in many operations, some pages are highly designed while others are more regimented, CyberPage works with Adobe's InDesign. Pages can be designed within InDesign or within CyberPage, and passed back and forth through the database. Furthermore, the two processes can be mingled on a single page, with some pieces being marked as InDesign and others as CyberPage.

Because of the design, CyberPage works with the company's legacy products as well as the newer suite, which includes a wire editor, standard writing and editing tools, an OPI server and all the related items needed to send packages either to print or the Web. The only fat clients are for Windows, but everything is accessible through a browser, allowing remote users or people on a Macintosh access to the system.

Though Grinberg hasn't wrapped the editorial package around CRM yet (he does have some ideas), customer relationship management is integral to the rest of the product line. Although many papers aren't taking advantage of it yet, the system is designed so that every contact with a customer can be tracked across the enterprise, allowing advertising to know, for example, if a customer has been complaining about delivery problems to circulation.

But it goes beyond that, allowing the data mining tools that came with the purchase of Gazette Technologies to come into play. Though these tools come with reports out of the box, the extensive table sets allow nonprogrammers to look at the database and play "what-if" games -- looking for patterns that can generate sales leads, finding small problems before they become big ones, and otherwise helping the company. Information from U.S. census reports and other places can be combined with what the newspaper knows about the communities it serves and its customers to help sales, circulation and -- eventually -- editorial do their jobs better.

Matrix, the circulation product, comes with a "poor man's CRM" built into it, essentially a supercharged contact manager that tracks the history of communications.

Matrix breaks circulation into several functions. One function handles customer service, while the rest deal with the mechanical steps of delivering the actual product. Whether with the full CRM package or the stripped-down version that comes with Matrix, when someone calls in, the phone room can quickly look up the customer (or nonsubscriber) in the database, either by caller ID or asking for a name and address. If marketing has other fields that it wants filled in with information from customers, those also are tracked.

With that information -- how many kids, what is your favorite section -- the paper can do some analysis and create sales campaigns. And, when the information from the sales campaign comes back, it can be analyzed to create yet more campaigns.

Circulation, too, gets help from personal digital assistants (PDAs), with tools to track exactly when papers or bundles are delivered, how many sell out of particular racks and other useful information, thus allowing circulation managers to rapidly adjust the draw as circulation needs change.

Advertising also draws on the CRM system. Of course, the sales and marketing data collected through the normal course of events can be analyzed to generate new leads and campaigns, but it need not go that far.

The fat client talks to the database through several middleware applications, allowing ad representatives to populate fields quickly when talking to a customer. If the customer is a repeat customer, or has an account, that information comes up automatically, along with the current rates and status of the account.

Unlike many systems, the use of CRM allows a paper to track the contact even if there is no sale, generating information that can be used later. And corporate clients can receive regular reports, via e-mail as HTML, or in tab-delimited formats that can be imported into their own systems.

And, in keeping with the Full Buzzword Compliance Act, the company was showing FlashNews, which uses PDAs built on the Palm OS as a reporting tool.

"Reporters can use it to file stories from a wireless PDA to the desk," Grinberg said. "It delivers data from the PDA as structured data with the IPTC header information, or it can arrive as an NIFT file with metadata or it can be a straightforward e-mail."

And, though it runs afoul of the buzzword compliance act, Grinberg admitted that photographers also could use the tool to file photos.

-- S.E.B

Geac Publishing Systems, (813) 872-9990, e-mail: vsinfo@geac.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.