Motor Presse Stuttgart GmbH & Co. KG

Well equipped for internationalization

Think global, act local. True to this motto, German publishing houses have for many years been increasingly positioning themselves to transfer media concepts and solutions that are successful on the domestic market to meet the requirements of foreign markets. Internationalization opens up opportunities for the secondary utilization and publication of contents, concepts and the introduction of magazine philosophies and promising publishing house offerings to markets that are less saturated than the domestic arena - such as the East European markets, for example. Motor Presse Stuttgart is a salient example of such strategies. As one of Europe's largest special interest publishers, Motor Presse is represented in more than 20 countries worldwide with its own companies or has licensed products accordingly. Today, subsidiaries and license partners generate almost half of the publisher’s sales.

The realization of such strategies is not least dependent on adequate technical support - a fact that the Stuttgart based publishers had soon become aware of. As managing director Dr. Friedrich Wehrle explained: "In the course of the years the multitude of magazines, the multitude of different departments resulted in a relatively high diversity of editorial systems and other solutions in place. Some five or six years ago we said 'this has got to stop' and it would be great if we could find a uniform solution for all of our magazines. In addition, we had applications in the digital area to address. Therefore we took a very close look at the technical solutions available on the market.”

After some very thorough assessments the decision was finally made in favor of censhare, a solution that meets the full range of demands and requirements in an almost ideal manner: the software also enables the integration of external employees and decentral editorial offices into a uniform, centrally controlled workflow across the boundaries of countries. The Swiss Motorpresse colleagues working in Zurich have been linked up to the system running at the Stuttgart headquarters since one year now, while the repro service providers have also been tied in. In addition, thanks to censhare a wide range of different media channels can be served from a central content pool - "conventional" magazines as well as "new" applications such as the creation of accompanying iPad apps. As Harald Humke, managing editor, sums the situation up: "Only with censhare are we in a position to realize the new media channels that iPad apps open up in a cost efficient manner, as the software allows us to transfer magazine contents to the iPad at extremely low manual input."

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