Walsworth Publishing Moves to Head-ofthe-Class Business Intelligence
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- WebFOCUS Developer Studio
- WebFOCUS Professional Server
- WebFOCUS Resource Governor
Tech Stack
- DB2
- Microsoft Access
- Microsoft SQL Server
- ODBC
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Predictive Quality Analytics
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Walsworth Publishing is a renowned publisher of yearbooks and other print materials. The company has been helping students put together cherished books for nearly 80 years. With roughly 3,700 schools as customers, the Marceline, Missouri-based company has learned that rapid turnaround time is the key to keeping its customers happy. The company is accelerating its processes with a WebFOCUS-based reporting portal that allows clients to easily access information. All of their information, including the status of printing jobs, page submissions, proofs, and deadlines (which determine pricing) are now available electronically. Students can monitor page submissions, see a list of items that need attention, and review color-coded proofs.
The Challenge
Walsworth Publishing, a publisher of yearbooks and other print materials, was facing a challenge in providing its clients with quick and easy access to information. The company was undergoing a massive technology overhaul that included deploying a new ERP system called Prism Win, a vertical application suite for the printing industry. This overhaul impacted Walsworth’s customer-facing applications as well as its internal reporting systems. The company needed a single business intelligence (BI) platform that could combine fragmented data created by different programmers using different databases and data management tools. The former reporting capabilities weren’t scalable, they weren’t flexible, and they couldn’t keep up with the company's growth.
The Solution
Walsworth Publishing decided to integrate all the diverse pieces of its data management landscape into a comprehensive BI environment that gave their customers self-service access to account information and streamlined operational reporting for internal sales, manufacturing, and finance personnel. The company chose Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform for its ability to easily gather data from many types of systems – including Lotus Notes, SQL Server, Prism Win, Microsoft Access, and DB2 data from a variety of AS/400 applications. The company used WebFOCUS Developer Studio to create a dashboard for the yearbook salesforce, which includes more than 120 employees. In addition to the sales staff members, managers and executive-level employees now have access to the dashboard as well, bringing the total number of users to roughly 170.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
IoT platform Enables Safety Solutions for U.S. School Districts
Designed to alert drivers when schoolchildren are present, especially in low-visibility conditions, school-zone flasher signals are typically updated manually at each school. The switching is based on the school calendar and manually changed when an unexpected early dismissal occurs, as in the case of a weather-event altering the normal schedule. The process to reprogram the flashers requires a significant effort by school district personnel to implement due to the large number of warning flashers installed across an entire school district.
Case Study
Revolutionizing Medical Training in India: GSL Smart Lab and the LAP Mentor
The GSL SMART Lab, a collective effort of the GSL College of Medicine and the GSL College of Nursing and Health Science, was facing a challenge in providing superior training to healthcare professionals. As clinical medicine was becoming more focused on patient safety and quality of care, the need for medical simulation to bridge the educational gap between the classroom and the clinical environment was becoming increasingly apparent. Dr. Sandeep Ganni, the director of the GSL SMART Lab, envisioned a world-class surgical and medical training center where physicians and healthcare professionals could learn skills through simulation training. He was looking for different simulators for different specialties to provide both basic and advanced simulation training. For laparoscopic surgery, he was interested in a high fidelity simulator that could provide basic surgical and suturing skills training for international accreditation as well as specific hands-on training in complex laparoscopic procedures for practicing physicians in India.
Case Study
Implementing Robotic Surgery Training Simulator for Enhanced Surgical Proficiency
Fundacio Puigvert, a leading European medical center specializing in Urology, Nephrology, and Andrology, faced a significant challenge in training its surgical residents. The institution recognized the need for a more standardized and comprehensive training curriculum, particularly in the area of robotic surgery. The challenge was underscored by two independent studies showing that less than 5% of residents in Italian and German residency programs could perform major or complex procedures by the end of their residency. The institution sought to establish a virtual reality simulation lab that would include endourological, laparoscopic, and robotic platforms. However, they needed a simulator that could replicate both the hardware and software of the robotic Da Vinci console used in the operating room, without being connected to the actual physical console. They also required a system that could provide both basic and advanced simulation training, and a metrics system to assess the proficiency of the trainees before they performed surgical procedures in the operating theater.
Case Study
Edinburgh Napier University streamlines long-distance learning with Cisco WebEX
• Geographically dispersed campus made in-person meetings costly and inconvenient.• Distance-learning programs in Malaysia, India, and China required dependable, user-friendly online tools to maximize interaction in collaborative workspaces.• Virtual learning environment required a separate sign-in process, resulting in a significant administrative burden for IT staff and limited adoption of collaboration technology.
Case Study
8x increased productivity with VKS
Before VKS, a teacher would spend a lot of time showing a group of 22 students how to build a set of stairs within a semester of 120 hours. Along with not leaving the teacher much time to provide one-on-one support for each student to properly learn carpentry, it also left a considerable amount of room for error. Key information would be misinterpreted or lost as the class was taught in the typical show-and-tell way.
Case Study
Scalable IoT Empowering GreenFlex's Sustainable Growth
GreenFlex, a company that supports sustainable development, decarbonization, and energy efficiency, faced several challenges in its quest to expand its business. The company needed to deploy a robust and sustainable IoT technology to support its growth. It was crucial for them to monitor and control devices at customer sites in a safe and reliable manner. They also needed to integrate devices across a range of communication protocols and gather and act on data to meet efficiency targets. GreenFlex had previously built IoT capabilities into its digital platform, GreenFlexIQ, to monitor and manage customer sites remotely. However, they soon realized that they needed a new platform to support their ambitions. They needed a platform that could scale to connect more devices for production management and make it easier for the operations team to manage devices in the field.
