Bill Offill was familiar with the horror stories from other classified ad managers.

“I understood that converting to a new advertising system meant major problems and lost revenue,” said Offill, director of classified advertising at the Houston Chronicle. “The whole experience was a big non-event.”

He was talking about a successful collaborative effort by the Chronicle and CKP Newspaper Systems Inc., based in Bedford, N.H., to convert the Chronicle’s classifieds from a full-featured legacy System Integrators Inc. system to one with a modern architecture that is totally extensible, lightning quick and easy to use.

Paul SoRelle

“The system saves the Chronicle one hour and a half of overtime per person on Friday evenings compared to the old system,” Offill said on the second anniversary of the system at the Chronicle. The speed of the system and the advanced pricing subsystem are major factors in the savings, according to Offill.

“Millennium lets us concentrate on sales, without worrying about the technology” said Offill, who is impressed with CKP’s ability to deliver system enhancements on demand. He also said that Millennium is a very intuitive system.

“Training an ad rep takes half the time than with the legacy SII system,” Offill said.

Ad representatives also praised the Millennium system.

“The speed of the system is a big plus,” said Rose Chandler, a Chronicle employment representative. “I can give you a price real fast.”

With the new system, sales representatives can price combination buys featuring multiple products with different column measures, as well as Web ads, all in one step.

“The ability to e-mail and fax ads to customers is a big time saver,” said Vicki Williamson, another Chronicle employment representative.

The Houston Chronicle worked with CKP, a company that provides software development, services, and support to the publishing industry, to successfully develop and install a full-featured editorial pagination system. The success of the editorial project gave Houston confidence that CKP, with an existing advertising solution, could make the enhancements necessary to exceed the specifications of anything on the market.

The result of their effort is the Millennium Advertising system.

The Chronicle’s requirements for a new classified system, in an abstract form, were relatively straightforward:

• Very fast, flat-line processing speeds, especially during peak times. For example, a combined function, such as compose/preview/rate/credit check/spell check, should take no longer than 1 to 2 seconds.

• A modern, platform-independent user interface.

• Open architecture for working with critical third-party internal and external systems was considered fundamental for future growth.

Here is how CKP met the requirements:

• Millennium Advertising delivered on this requirement with average response time of 1 second, and benchmarked insertion rate of 15,000 ads per hour.

• The Millennium Advertising system features an efficient tab-style, Java user interface that runs on a browser or as a stand-alone application. The same client binaries run on Windows, Mac OS, or Sun Solaris platforms.

• Millennium Advertising has successfully interfaced with an Admarc business system, as well as providing a number of new media interfaces.

Development and project management

CKP delivered the core components of the new Millennium Advertising system to the Houston Chronicle in May 1998. CKP demonstrated the Java user-interface, running on a browser, to a task force comprised of sales representatives from each of the inside sales departments.

From that point forward, the task force met on a weekly basis with members of the Chronicle’s pre-publishing information and support department to share feedback on system development. In turn, members of the systems team worked closely with developers and applications specialists at CKP to implement feedback gathered from all departments in a consultative atmosphere.

The task force members could access the Millennium Advertising user interface from a Web page on the Chronicle’s Intranet, which allowed them to easily keep up with changes as they were implemented. As an added bonus, a systems person wasn’t required to load software on a user’s PC every time CKP delivered new software.

Accounting, credit, and composing personnel had similar access to Millennium, and also contributed their expertise to the development of the new system.

Convert through go-live

The Houston Chronicle has a large inside sales department with 150 sales reps spread over two locations.

On a busy Friday, sales representatives enter more than 5,000 ads. The last thing that anyone wanted to consider was a conversion effort that involved re-keying the data. Due to the system architecture of Millennium Advertising, this problem was happily avoided. Utilities for batch processing allowed the data from the legacy SII system to be converted, and loaded into the Millennium Advertising database.

Early in April 1999, the Chronicle’s legacy SII system began to feed CAP, Millennium’s built-in classified pagination system. The composing room was confronted with the challenge of publishing 50 sub products, running in 20 zones, on a new pagination tool.

At this point, the true benefit of the programmatic conversion process was realized. Houston systems personnel and CKP staff were able to focus on the stabilization and institutionalization of all the production and composing processes before having to move users to the new order entry application. During this phase of the project all publishing was handled by the Millennium Advertising system, while ads were still entered on the legacy SII system.

One month later, on May 2, 1999, the first live user entered ads on the Millennium Advertising system. The challenge of matching composition styles, which had been successfully fine-tuned during the production conversion, resulted in lineage differences held to a fraction of a percent. Consequently, rate quotes on the old system matched rate quotes on the new system. Ads still taken on the legacy SII system were run through the nightly conversion and inserted into the Millennium database for pagination.

The contributions of the sales representative task force paid off during end-user training. Users found that the new interface met their workflow needs in an intuitive way; consequently, a one-day training course was sufficient to get them into live production. These users still had access to the legacy SII system, but put new ads into the Millennium system.

Gradually, as more departments were trained, fewer and fewer ads needed to be converted. Eight weeks after the conversion started, all ads were entered on the Millennium system. By early June, all users had been successfully trained and transitioned to the new system, and shortly thereafter the legacy SII system was shut down.

Throughout the eight-week conversion process, CKP personnel were on-site in Houston, providing installation support and monitoring conversions and interfaces to the business system, as well as providing extensive end-user training.

Since the installation

Almost two years after the installation of the system, and more than 1.6 million ads later, Houston continues to maintain a close ongoing development, enhancement and support relationship with CKP.

In the last two years, CKP has helped Houston with a 50-inch web conversion — a massive classification re-map.

Other projects handled by CKP include:

• System-generated legal affidavit that includes proof of legal ads eliminating the need for tearsheets

• eXtensible Markup Language input and output of ads to the Houston Interactive Web product

• A Web-based order entry extension for private-party customers to dynamically preview and rate classified ads on the Web

• New sales prompt forms for capturing fielded data to enhance searching online advertising databases.

Most recently, a real-time interface to the business system has been developed, which allows a subscriber or account lookup when a credit check is initiated.

Paul SoRelle is the manager of prepress implementation and support for the Houston Chronicle. He can be reached via e-mail at paul.sorelle@chron.com. CKP News-paper Systems Inc. can be reached via e-mail at james.mooney@ckp.com.