w&co MediaServices

At home in the pre-press sector

In many cases, workflows within editorial offices are certainly not trivial. At w&co, however, a Munich headquartered media service provider, the problem takes on entirely different dimensions, as the professionals are committed to becoming involved in the work processes of their publishing house, mail order and industrial customers at the earliest possible stage. This can only succeed with the help of a highly flexible production system – censhare.

With around 100 members of staff, w&co supports its customers with classic pre-press services such as layout and image data management, but also attends to their online activities as well as IT administration. The customer roster includes a number of medium-sized and large scale publishing houses such as Südwestpresse, Ulm, or Axel-Springer-Verlag, Hamburg, as well as mail order companies and industrial clients. Individual solutions are the order of the day, and this calls for a media production system integrating the work steps customers have delegated to their service providers and the relevant data transfer between both parties. This smooth integration, however, is not a rigid standard procedure but must be tailored to a very wide range of different requirements. w&co has found precisely such a system in censhare.

“What makes censhare so important for us? On the one hand, we have the in-house process optimization, connected with the consistent networking with our foreign location in Bulgaria, and on the other hand, we have the seamless integration and networking with our clients,“ explains Karl-Ulrich Hecker, authorized officer and head of sales. This also enables transparent solutions in which the outsourcing of content production does not require any far reaching changes in workflows on the customer side. Instead, censhare implicitly handles the exchange of data, and manages workflows, also across major distances, as if they were local. In this way, w&co is able to tie in its own location in distant Bulgaria, for example.

As managing director Alexander Werkmeister explains: "The workflows at publishing houses start long before QuarkXPress or InDesign enter the picture. In the final instance it is all about editorial processes that you have to have under control. censhare became so interesting for us because it covers the entire value creation chain, from the editorial system all the way through to the process control of media production. In view of these strengths we regarded cooperation with censhare as highly interesting – especially since our aim is also to be integrated into customer processes at the earliest possible stage and also sell such solutions to our clients."