Case Studies » Content » Online Books

HOV Services Does their Homework to Craft Solution for a Leading Online Educational Publishing Company.
Challenge
A top online publishing company prides itself on offering the latest and most updated information technology content, but it isn’t as easy as it looks. The online publishing firm receives millions of pages of content from various publishers. Each of the publishers may send their data to the publishing company in various formats and structures. The online publishing firm’s staff receives numerous files in such formats as Quark Xpress, Frame Maker, Page Maker, Hard Copy and Adobe PDF, among others. With each file in a different format, they were using internal staff and part time employees to manually code the XML tags on each file. On average, the staff was able to convert one reference title every 3 to 4 weeks. In the meantime, the publishing company experiences an accumulation of backlogged data. The backlog prevented them from delivering the content to the Website on time, and publishers became increasingly frustrated with the online publishing firm as a service provider. Naturally, they considered increasing capacity in order to meet and exceed the publishers’ expectations; however, due to huge costs and infrastructure issues, they were unable to reengineer their current process.

HOV Solution
HOV Services worked in conjunction with the online publishing firm’s team to craft an XML conversion solution and implement a graphic workflow aimed at increasing their turnaround times and achieving cost savings. On a daily basis, HOV Services receives files from the publishing firm, and uploads them into an offshore workflow. Next, data is distributed to conversion sites for data extraction, styling, XML conversion, XML validation and graphic manipulation. At the completion of conversion, HOV Services transfers the XML and Graphic Files to their FTP server for upload into the clients Web site. HOV Services’ offshore team accesses the Web site and performs a Quality Audit to ensure that document structure is properly rendered through the XSLT, and all tables, images and program listings are in the appropriate places.

Benefits
HOV’s XML conversion solution has already enabled the publishing company to improve their service levels and reduce cost expenditures by more than 25%. The XML conversion solution has dramatically decreased turnaround times by 30 days, allowing the publishing firm to meet their publishers’ 45-day deadline demand. Also, because HOV Services now handles the quality audits on every file, the customer is able to dedicate more time to their core business. HOV Services’ quality measurements, established through our Total Quality Management process, have exceeded their requirements over the past several months. Finally, HOV Services's solution has also helped them to collect more titles from various publishers, resulting in an increase in the number of subscribers to their Web site.