The Globe and Mail of Toronto last month took steps to fortify its circulation oversight by rolling out circulation management software from SAP.

Implementation of the circ management module of mySAP Business Suite software follows the newspaper’s 2002 rollout of the mySAP advertising module, said Perry Nixdorf, vice president of operations for The Globe and Mail.

The circ management app’s launch was part of a multipronged upgrade that also saw the newspaper (daily, 330,145; Saturday, 412,688) roll out SAP’s R/3 and Business Warehouse modules.

Photo: The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail’s SAP project team.
 

The implementations represent just the beginning of a major undertaking for The Globe and Mail that, when complete, will overhaul the publisher’s 23-year-old mainframe-based system.

“We’re still putting data into the Business Warehouse system and dealing with some issues, but for all intents and purposes this is our system of record at this point,” Nixdorf said.

Prior to SAP, the publisher relied on an IBM-hosted mainframe system called CICCS.

“It was tuned to our needs over the course of 23 years,” Nixdorf said. “So we just finished replacing a system that was very specific to our requirements.”

Nixdorf said CICCS, while appropriate for the time, had outlived its usefulness.

“What we’ve replaced it with is a very structured, state-of-the-art system that gives us the kind of reporting on a day-today basis that we feel will help us manage our business,” he said.

The SAP apps provide The Globe and Mail with a view of all subscribers and distribution networks by providing reporting tools to track every outlet from home delivery to retail and single-copy.

According to installation project manager Selvie Thevathasan there are approximately 100 users who access the SAP circulation app, including those from the circulation department and members of the finance department that support the circulation business. Eventually, Nixdorf said the app will be rolled out to users in the field delivering The Globe and Mail.

“We’re not there yet, but that was part of the vision when we set out to implement this,” he said.

Regional access

The Globe and Mail is printed and distributed coast to coast and users at its regional offices can access the system to print out shipping documents and use that information in their own markets to distribute the paper and manage agents and carriers.

“We try to get them soft copy data files that they can use and manipulate, and we hope to extend that to something more sophisticated down the road,” Thevathasan said.

The goal is to leverage the app to automate as many processes as possible.

“We want to give agents direct online access to their route lists and so on to streamline as much as we can,” Nixdorf said.

Although the project is still young and most of the data out of the R/3 app is currently operational and tactical, Thevathasan said additional integration between circulation and finance is a key component.

“Finance has more information about the activities that relate to the distribution outlets, and all of that data will also be exported out to the Business Warehouse allowing management to slice and dice the data and analyze it in whatever way they need to,” she said. “There’s a greater level of detail and we can provide that data to management and make it more visible and accessible to them in a way that we couldn’t before.”

More robust reporting

The Globe and Mail is still loading information into the Business Warehouse, and will eventually be able to update that information on a daily basis, or even more frequently, to generate any reports it deems necessary. Currently, some 15 reports are generated daily, ranging from circulation and finance reports that allow the publisher to track business, to strictly financial reports that aid the finance department with month-end processing and other functions.

“We’re really starting with a small footprint with respect to strategic reporting at this point,” Nixdorf said. “In the coming weeks the focus will be shifting from operational reporting to more strategic reporting coming out of Business Warehouse and getting the business more exposed to that data and using that data.”

In addition to its reporting capabilities, the mySAP circ R/3 module will be used to support customer service through its integration with the daily’s Web site, allowing subscribers to go online for customer service. As part of that online customer service feature, The Globe and Mail identified key areas that it opted to make real-time on the site.

 “We selected things like customer complaints because we felt that would yield the biggest business benefit,” Thevathasan said. “If a customer goes and enters a complaint on the Web site, we see it right away and now they have an additional channel to contact us besides IVR or speaking to a customer service rep.”

Thevathasan said the go-live of the app has allowed the publisher to improve its Web offerings and self-service options for users and she hopes to roll out additional improvements on the Web.

“SAP as a foundation gives us a lot of flexibility to do that.”

Because of the magnitude of the project, Nixdorf said there are still a lot of bugs to work out to ensure users increased speed and process efficiency.

“We will continue through the course of the upcoming year to make sure that we continually try to improve through development of the tool itself and the module,” he said. “We won’t take on other modules until we really feel the circulation module is working solidly for us. I would say that through 2008, we’ll be refining, tuning and working on process improvement.”

Nixdorf and Thevathasan commended The Globe and Mail’s SAP project team, citing the operational and integration challenges it faced.