Offshore Magazine Outsourcing

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Thomas on August 29, 2008 at 5:59pm

We've found it difficult to offshore magazine workflow's in their entirety, largely due to the rapid-fire nature of the industry, quality-control, timing and overall energy. The amount of project management resources we've had to exert in order to maintain comparable quality and thoroughness (when offshoring more than 50% of a publication's production) has pretty much made it a wash.

However, we have found that doing shared workflows has been very promising. In other words, our project managers are also page layout production artists and they oversee offshore production. It makes it much easier to train and find the best "rhythm" when you have strong talent managing offshore production.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Hill on August 30, 2008 at 10:40am

Joshua, thanks so much for this comment. Much appreciated and insightful.

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Thomas on September 2, 2008 at 8:35pm

Hmm... I was kinda' hoping for more input/opinions on this topic?

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Permalink Reply by Jim Hill on September 3, 2008 at 11:14am

Yes, I would be very interested in hearing from others about the state of outsourcing in the magazine pre-press phase relative to challenges and successes, what works well and what does not work well and why. Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks Joshua.

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Permalink Reply by Hoshie Ghaswalla on September 4, 2008 at 12:30am

Hi Jill & Josh. For the last two years we have been done a magazine and website out of India. And it is just not production related work we even do content in terms of planning, interviews and the writing out of India. The easy part about this is our HQ is in India and the product we publish is about outsourcing and offshoring And we also have a content BPO so we have been on top of this area for a while. BTW this monthly magazine is our own product. Our main circulation is in North America, followed by Western Europe and then the rest of the world. The staff for this unit sits in the US as well as India and travels frequently. So we are actually doing this end to end. Of course there are issues but there are ways of getting around them. This could become a very long post so I'd be happy to speak to you'll more about it as and when needed. I am currently in India but should be on the east coast by the end of this month. So would be happy to meet up personally or do a call from India or when I am in the US.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Hill on September 10, 2008 at 8:51am

Hoshie, I would be interested in knowing more about your outsourcing magazine. Call me any time at 214-684-9356.

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Permalink Reply by Jack Beaudoin on September 12, 2008 at 3:20pm

Jim,

I did a little pilot three months ago outsourcing pagination. Our experience was that the preparation and review/correction process consumed much of the time we hoped to gain (our editors are multi-taskers -- reporters/writers/paginators). The quality was not up to our publication standards but showed enough promise to make us think it might work with a strong set of rules in place -- ultimately, it would require a strong set of templates, I think. I'd be happy to speak to you about ou experiences, or put you in touch with our partner.

Jack

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Permalink Reply by Jim Hill on September 14, 2008 at 1:10pm

Jack, thanks for the note and would enjoy talking about your experience with magazine outsourcing. Use my pesonal email at talljim0155@yahoo.com. Thanks again.

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Thomas on September 15, 2008 at 7:10pm

Thanks for the input, Jack. That's exactly what we faced. There's a comment in this thread from Cadmus which seems to be the classic sales pitch. Every offshore company that we've interviewed started the conversation very similarly to that comment, loads of experience, piles of samples but after multiple rounds of testing ... in the end, the quality simply isn't up to our standards.

However, we did find that laying extremely strict rules and even stricter templates helped the cycle immensely. We also accompanied all of our templates and guides with training videos which have gone a LLLOOONNNGGG way in smoothening out the process.

Think large corporate branding guides ... combined with the kind of instructions you write for data entry teams.

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Permalink Reply by James McQueen on September 12, 2008 at 3:50pm

Jim, I have over 15 Titles in India right now. From Real Estate, Assocations, Consumer Guides and Special Interest.

We built a team in US and India with years of magazine experince that communicate and work with our customers daily.

Our teams only work on magazines and understand the turn times and needs for a fast pace article/ad driven product.

We have customers who publish a monthly magazine with only two full time staff members.

We are the back office of others to allow them to redeply their staff into web and marketing projects.



http://www.foliochannels.com/channels/Cadmus/

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Permalink Reply by Adam Evans on September 12, 2008 at 11:01pm

Contact me for a name and number. I have a friend who has his publications printed over seas.
Adam

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Permalink Reply by Jim Hill on September 13, 2008 at 10:47am

Thanks Adam for this insight and follow up. Would enjoy talking. Use my email at talljim0155@yahoo.com.

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