Optimizing a $200 million workflow with InCopy CS2 in 7 days.

In addition to publishing [1] Quark VS InDesign.com, articles and books for other publications, and freelance design and publishing, I am a creative workflow optimizer. In the simplest of terms, I’m a consultant who comes into your shop, studio, agency, or office, examines what you do and how you do it, and helps you and your staff make your workflow more efficient, cost-effective, and creative.

InCopy has been a key element in several workflow transformations and optimizations I have executed. This is a case study of one such workflow optimization.

The Client

The Omega Industrial Environs (not the company’s real name) workflow includes designers laying out graphically rich 250-600 page proposal books, brochures, and DVD-hosted web content that include editorial content from a team of proposal writers; financial charts, graphs, and tables from the accounting team, and; floorplans, maps, and schematics from the engineering and architecture teams. With copy, financial data, and even technical drawings changing throughout the proposal process up to the very last moment, the existing Omega Industrial Environs workflow put tremendous strain on the Design department to constantly update and revise large portions of the bound proposal books.

A few months ago, I was brought in to optimize the Omega workflow. By optimizing the workflow with comprehensive staff education and solution deployment, including the migration from Microsoft Word to Adobe InCopy CS2, I helped Omega remove the burden of updating other departments’ content from the shoulders of the creative team, drastically speeding the proposal generation process and leaving the creatives and all personnel to focus on what they do best. In the process, overtime hours consumed by the Design department plummeted from an average of 770 per proposal to 50.

Although the name of the company and certain details of this case study have been altered to preserve confidentiality and “Omega’s” competitive advantage, it is based upon an actual workflow optimization at a real company.

The Specs

Personnel: Design: 3 print designers, 1 print and Web designer; Copywriting: 3 people; Accounting: 2 people; Engineering: 4 people, and; 1 project manager.

The client departments and personnel (legend for flow charts).

Deliverables: Offset- and digitally-printed detailed and graphically-rich 250-600 page bound proposal books, as well as brochures and DVD-hosted Web content.

Output: InDesign CS-native .INDD layouts and .INBK InDesign book files and their assets (TIFF, EPS, PDF).

Incoming Document Assets: Copywriting: Microsoft Word .DOC; Accounting: Microsoft Word .DOC and Microsoft Excel .XLS; Engineering: Microsoft Access (converted to XML), Microsoft Visio (converted to PDF), and AutoCad and other CAD and schematic file formats (converted to PDF, TIFF, or EPS formats), and; Design: InDesign .INDD documents, and Photoshop and Illustrator documents (converted to PDF, TIFF, EPS).

Systems Environment: Design and Project Manager: Macintosh OS 10.4; Copywriting: Divided between Macintosh OS 10.4 and Windows 2000; Accounting and Engineering: Windows XP Professional.

The Problem

Issue 1: Omega’s proposal generation workflow consists of four departments and a project manager working concurrently to produce content- and design-rich long documents on tight deadlines. During the process content from three of the departments frequently changes, and is provided to the fourth department, Design, which must just as frequently change and proof the layout to reflect the updated content. All departments work in different applications that have little (if any) automated integration. This process is inefficient, error-prone, and results in substantial and unnecessary work hours per proposal.

Accounting, Copywriting, and Engineering departments all work in disparate, best-of-breed applications independently of one another. As they draft, revise, and finalize their respective portions of the proposal, they feed each version to the Design department for layout within InDesign CS. As Design receives each updated asset, they place it into the in-progress layout and export PDFs from InDesign to initiate PDF-based reviews with content authors. PDFs are e-mailed to destination departments, who mark-up the PDF and return it—often with replacement assets—via e-mail or sneaker net to the Design department. Design affects the changes, including importing and re-formatting new assets, exports new PDFs, and sends them out for a subsequent round of review.

The Problem - all content, revisions, and proofing flow through the designers.

Simultaneous with managing the proofing, review, and update of existing pages, Design creates new pages as well as illustrations and other creative assets not provided by other departments. The Omega designers report significant difficulty concentrating on creating content due to the frequent changes and proofs required by other departments. The salaried creatives also incur overtime in excess of 20 hours per week, per employee during the proposal creation process.

Issue 2: Content changes may include the addition, subtraction, or relocation of several dozen pages—often at the last minute. Not only do such changes cause text to reflow, but the Design department must also go back through the document moving all accompanying assets and changing alignment of objects and text that swaps between left- and right-read pages (for example, a sidebar text frame in the outside margin must be manually repositioned to follow its to main text story to which it belongs).

Issue 3: The Design department is Mac-based, as is the project manager, while all other departments in the proposal workflow work on Windows. All departments actively work, to varying degrees, on their own creative content, and are eager to participate more in the layout process. The Copywriting department, for example, typically assists in the selection of site and construction photographs.

Accounting, Copywriting, and Engineering departments all work in disparate, best-of-breed applications that lack more than import/export integration with the Design department’s InDesign CS, Illustrator CS, and Photoshop CS. Often non-importable formats are provided to Design for conversion to compatible assets. Additionally, even non-design personnel who could or would assist with the layout process are prohibited from doing so by the incompatibility of their fonts and operating systems.

Between the two types of fonts available, PostScript Type 1 and TrueType, the Design department has standardized its library to the higher quality Type 1. Type 1 fonts are not cross-platform, and even parallel, operating system-specific versions, result in text reflow and glyph substitution when InDesign and other creative files, which are cross-platform, move between Windows and Mac computers. As a result, other departments that could relieve Design of some of the burden, are unable to render assistance due to platform and font incompatibilities.

Additionally, several non-creative members of the team have difficulty understanding how to install and manage fonts (both Macintosh and Windows system users).

The Solution

The proposal workflow was already as efficient as the Omega team could make it with their existing technology, which was only recently outdated. Specifically:

• All proposal layouts and assets are stored on, and opened from, a central server repository.
• Both InDesign layouts and corresponding Word documents are based on a standardized style sheet, reducing the restyling work every time the Design department must re-place updated Word documents from other departments. The outline-like styles remain aesthetically the same in Word from proposal to proposal, while style definitions are altered in InDesign.
• Hardcopy proofing and review had long ago been abandoned in favor of PDF-based reviews using Acrobat 6 Professional on all desktops.
• Dynamic content is stored in a network-accessible Microsoft Access database, and exported via scripted command to XML for manual import into InDesign.
• DVD-hosted Web content is created efficiently in GoLive CS (move to GoLive CS2 is pending) by combining packaged content from InDesign (utilizing InDesign’s Package for GoLive feature), Word, Excel, and Access content exported to XML, and ImageReady-based batch conversion of digital image content.

Solution to Issue 1:

• Upgrade the Design department to Adobe InDesign CS 2.
• Replace Microsoft Word with Adobe InCopy CS2 in all departments.
• Institute assignments-based collaborative workflow allowing non-linear, concurrent work in all departments.
• Eliminate the PDF-based review in favor of live collaboration.
• Leverage existing skills to distill disparate, non-integrating applications’ output files into workflow-compatible assets at the content creator creation phase instead of requiring conversion in Design department.

Solution to Issue 2: Anchored objects, object styles, and align to spine features.

Solution to Issue 3:

• Convert all fonts to cross-platform OpenType.
• Install hands-off, server-side font management and activation.

The Execution

The first step was up-training the Design department from InDesign CS to their recently purchased InDesign CS2.

Day 1 & 2: Creative personnel were already experts in InDesign, and the two-day session was much less a training class than a conversation. Designers asked questions and presented their pain points with InDesign, while I answered their questions and showed them how to overcome their pain points. Throughout, the new and updated features of CS2 were discovered, and how they may be exploited creatively was discussed.

During this time Issue 2 was resolved by teaching the designers to make effective use of: anchored objects, which tether objects outside the text flow to follow and flow with specific locations within the text flow; align to spine features that automatically reposition and realign objects and text based on their relationship to the spine of a bound document, and; object styles for storing, instantly applying, and making document-wide changes to anchored objects.

After I dispelled a number of misconceptions the team held about the printability of native Photoshop .PSD and Illustrator .AI files, we further trimmed the fat from their workflow by eliminating the need to resave original artwork in those formats into intermediary graphics formats like TIFF and EPS for placement into InDesign.

Day 3: On day three, InCopy CS2 was introduced. As the Design department was the most technically savvy of all the departments in the workflow (excepting the corporate IT personnel who were Mac-challenged), they typically acted as workflow support. Therefore it was imperative that they not only know the tools and procedures for their side of the new optimized workflow, but they also have a mastery of InCopy so they might assist other non-creative users. It took less than a day for the designers to reach an expert grasp of using InCopy CS2 as well as creating and managing InCopy assignments from within InDesign.

The project manager, who oversees the proposal process from all four departments, attended the day three training. So impressed was he at the end of the day by the efficiency of the InDesign-InCopy integration and its promise for his team, that he agreed to accelerate the workflow optimization schedule—we were going live the next day.

It’s important to note that I was initially brought in to begin what Omega expected would be a three month optimization and migration process, and that the consultation began while the team was actively working on a proposal. Although they hoped to answer several InDesign questions and frustrations for the Design department and apply them to the current proposal, they did not expect to make any significant changes to the workflow itself until after the completion of that proposal. At my urging, however, the team agreed to move the consultation out of the theoretical into the practical after the third day of consultation.

Day 4: Planned as a day to demonstrate the soon-to-be optimized workflow to IT and other departments, day four became actual deployment.

InCopy CS2 was installed on all proposal team Windows and Macintosh desktops outside the Design department, with copies on two of the four designers’ Macs. An ideal deployment would have included a customized InCopy CS2 install package with pre-configured scripts, workspaces, and default styles and preferences. However, due to the rapid acceleration of the plan, we used an out-of-the-box installation, and developed a plan for IT to later to create and push defaults and customizations to users’ machines via SMS.

I solved the font incompatibility problem (issue 3) between Mac- and Windows-based users in the workflow by converting Omega’s font library to OpenType, a format they had previously known little about. Because the majority of their Type 1 font library was published by Adobe, it was a simple matter to upgrade all but a few fonts to OpenType by purchasing Adobe’s Font Folio OpenType Edition. The remaining typefaces used by Omega were not available from their respective foundries in OpenType format, so FontLab was licensed to easily convert the Mac-only Type 1 fonts to cross-platform OpenType.

Overcoming the difficulty experienced by some users in installing and managing proposal fonts, with the added benefit of lifting font distribution from the shoulders of designers, was just as simple—I employed Extensis Suitcase Server X1, a server-based font manager with remote administration, licensing compliance control, and unmanned or directed client system font activation. Suitcase Server and the entire Omega font library was installed on the proposal document server. Copies of Suitcase Desktop Edition, which can act as standalone, local font managers, as well as clients to the server, were installed to the users’ Windows and Mac workstations. Once installed and tested, Suitcase Server was populated with the team’s OpenType font library.

Controlled by a remote administrator—in this case the production manager via her desktop Mac—Suitcase Server manages and delivers all the fonts needed by the workgroup. The production manager simply activates the proposal’s fonts or font groups via Suitcase Server’s remote administration panel, and the server pushes the fonts to client systems.

Because Suitcase includes font auto-activation plug-ins for InDesign and InCopy, even if the production manager forgets to push the fonts, the client versions of Suitcase running on the desktops will automatically request and activate the needed fonts from the server. When writers, accountants, and the rest of the proposal team open their assignments in InCopy CS2, they will never see a font missing warning; all in-use fonts will activate automatically on their systems.

Although Omega’s document server employed full hard drive mirroring at four points during the day, and a daily tape backup, the new workflow’s concurrent document access from within all departments and oversight by the project manager gave me concern for at least the initial possibility of user error leading to data loss. Specifically, I was concerned with some users reverting to old habits of copying asset files to their local computers, editing locally, then moving the files back to the server, thus possibly overwriting the work of other users. To eliminate this possibility, and to provide an extra layer of backup via file versioning, Creative Suite 2’s Version Cue technology was activated and configured on all workflow computers. Because all departments were involved in the creative process somehow—Copywriting, for example, used Photoshop to correct and touch-up photographs and proofed Web content live in GoLive while Engineering and even Accounting used Illustrator for some of their less technical conceptual drawings and illustrations, and every department required Acrobat Professional—Omega had already licensed the full Creative Suite 2 for all desktops in the workflow. Thus there was no licensing impediment to the inclusion of Version Cue in the workflow.

Concluding the day was an IT briefing and Q&A session that covered InDesign’s and InCopy’s internal saveddata backup features; nuances of working with Version Cue-managed content; discussion about extending and automating functionality with scripting in InDesign, InCopy, and Adobe Bridge, which all users would employ for basic digital asset management, and; how to resolve some of the common technical issues users may encounter with the constituent applications in the new optimized workflow.

Day 5: Originally planned as my last day on-site wherein I would provide the first half of InCopy and optimized workflow training to the Copywriting, Accounting, and Engineering departments, the new live deployment extended my visit to seven consecutive days, and day five became on-the-job training to Copywriting.

All three writers were extremely proficient writing marketing copy in Microsoft Word. Their installations of Word were moderately customized with workflow-specific autocorrect settings, document templates, style sheets, keyboard shortcuts, and simple text-insertion or replacement macros. Although they were eager to improve their workflow and gain better perspective on how their work integrates with other departments’ in the proposal layouts, the writers were skeptical that InCopy could replace Microsoft Word and apprehensive about losing their productivity.

Anticipating this, during day three work with the Design department, I had had the designers prepare InCopy assignments from an already laid-out but still under revision chapter of the current proposal. At the beginning of the writers’ training, I opened the InCopy assignment, imported and copyfit the most recently revised Word documents, and showed the changes in real-time in the InDesign layout snapshot of InCopy’s Layout view. While this impressed and excited them, my next step of creating text macros and setting autocorrect options from settings they shouted out on-the-fly was what truly dispelled their fear.

Throughout the remainder of the day, the writers learned to work in, collaborate on, and customize InCopy CS2 hands-on, employing active, mission-critical documents. During the second half of the day I brought the project manager and one of the designers to sit in so they would be aware of the Copywriting team’s concerns and new procedures and be able to act as in-house how-to support.

Day 6: Similar to the day before with the writers, the sixth day was training for the Accounting and Engineering departments; the latter consisted of four engineering and architecture team managers who each oversaw a combined staff of twenty-three people who would not be directly involved in the proposal creation process. As these departments produced less copy and more artwork, less time was spent discussing InCopy’s copyfitting and text-insertion and replacement automation features in favor of a greater focus on placing imagery and tabular data into the layout. We also spent a good portion of the day optimizing the accounting and engineering staff’s image creation procedures, including building efficient layers and layer comps in Photoshop to ease version experimentation when placing images into InCopy and how to import and batch convert various types of technical drawings, plans, and schematics into Illustrator or via scripts in the Adobe Bridge.

Again, the project manager and a representative from the Design department were asked to attend the latter half of the Engineering and Accounting education session.

Day 7: To reduce any lingering trepidation about adopting the new optimized workflow while working on actual, mission-critical deadline documents, I made the seventh day light-hearted and fun. With the assistance of the project manager and the Design department, we decorated the common areas and individual offices of the proposal team with streamers, homemade signs proclaiming “It’s Workflow Optimization Day!”, and strategically placed doughnuts, muffins, bagels, and candy throughout the team’s areas. Being a Sunday, business attire was not a concern, so I asked everyone on the team to wear her brightest, most garish attire (the result was a cacophony of tie-dyes, cartoon characters, and blinding neon hues).

We began the day with an all-hands pep rally to pump up excitement, then the team broke into their respective department groups and went to work.

During the first hour, the Design department prepared the materials. The production manager ran preflight reports from the in-progress layouts, specifying the in-use fonts to be pushed to client systems via remote administration of the Suitcase Server. While she did that from her desk, each of the three remaining designers created InCopy assignments from the first batch of proposal chapters.

The Accounting team finished up their latest batch of figures while Engineering prepped their drawings, plans, and Visio charts in Photoshop and Illustrator. The Copywriting team migrated their Word customizations to InCopy. Each took a task—user dictionary entries for one, autocorrect options for another, and text macros for the third—and distributed the results to the others when finished. In just over an hour, all three departments were setup and opening their first assignment files in InCopy.

Because the four departments and project manager were spread throughout an entire floor of a large office building, I couldn’t be within earshot at all times incase of a question. To compensate, all team members put my cell phone number on speed-dial, and I wore a hands-free headset. And, since I couldn’t see everyone’s screen at all times, and reversion to old habits was a risk, I provided an incentive for peer support—tattle-telling.

In addition to hourly giveaways of fun prizes like baseball hats, Frisbees, candy bars, toys, and similar tchatchkis for correctly answering InCopy-related questions, I offered slightly better prizes (gift certificates to local restaurants and Target, DVDs, and mousepads) to anyone who catching a co-worker reverting to using Microsoft Word, marking up a PDF, or trying to get a designer to place an image or other asset into the layout for her. While I had brought over a dozen “tattle-tale” prizes in all, I was pleasantly surprised to only give away two during the course of the day (the remainder were handed out at the end of the day to everyone who hadn’t yet received one).

By mid-day, everyone was over the hurdle of “how do I” training reminder questions, and was working—without waiting on anyone else. Copywriting had finished importing, editing, and copyfitting existing Word documents into the InCopy assignment, and were beginning to write new material directly in InCopy. Accounting had also completed its imports and conversions, and was back to crunching numbers in Excel; as the accountants finished a dataset, they imported it into InCopy, checked the story in, and moved on to the next. Most of Engineering’s artwork was placed in InCopy, although they did require some changes to the layout in terms of graphic frame resizing and the addition of several new, fold-out pages, which Design quickly implemented and re-assigned to Engineering. The project manager, working in InDesign CS2 himself, kept an eye on everyone’s progress and, as each assignment was checked in, added notes and revisions to content for review by the authors. In between, he assisted Copywriting and Design by placing photographs and illustrations.

Except for the quickly-accomplished changes required by Engineering, Design left the assigned chapters alone. While everyone else filled in, edited, and revised the content of laid-out chapters, the designers were designing new layouts and creating InCopy assignments for subsequent content sections. Without the constant interruptions caused by incoming asset changes and marked-up PDFs, the designers found themselves working so quickly that one jumped out of InDesign and into GoLive to begin the Web content creation—typically a process that would not begin for another four weeks.

We wrapped up the day early with another all-hands meeting at two o’clock because everyone felt that she had a solid grasp of the workflow, and that she was already ahead in her work.

The excitement in the room was tremendous. Everyone in all four departments expressed a strong feeling of being more connected to the proposal, more in command of her individual contributions, and more in touch with the work of the other team members. InCopy’s layout view allowed each department to see not only their contributions and Design’s, but also the work of the other departments as it was done. This lead to tighter collaboration between the departments, especially for the Copywriting team whose work had to describe and support the content from both Accounting and Engineering. During the wrap-up meeting team members were complimenting each other’s work and brainstorming ideas for collaborating—discussions they could previously only have after Design had completed the layout modification and sent out PDF proofs. No one missed Acrobat and PDF-based reviewing.

Among the group, only the writers felt that they were not yet as proficient writing in InCopy as they were in Word, although they felt it would only be a short time before they were. More importantly, everyone, including the writers, felt strongly that her work as a whole had been greatly sped up by the elimination of the linear review and change process. Design, in particular, was ecstatic that changes were no longer filtered through them. They still had the control they needed, but were no longer responsible for affecting the changes that had always been within the purview of other departments. The production manager estimated that, in less than a single day, the layout of the proposal was already more than a week ahead of schedule. That belief was echoed by each department, putting estimates of their schedule advancements at between two and fourteen days.

The Result

Designers were at the center of the old Omega workflow—one designer described it as “everyone whirls around us like an amusement park ride—the closer we get to deadline, the faster the whirling.” This workflow forced the other departments to wait to see their requested changes. At the same time, the Design department had difficulty concentrating on creating new work with the constant interruptions and change requests. All extra-departmental content had to be styled and moved numerous times, which dramatically slowed down the entire document creation process. Although structural changes involving page composition and location and number of pages were still required from time to time, responsibility for the majority of modifications to existing content was no longer on the shoulders of the designers, resulting in the elimination of approximately 40% of their daily tasks, and almost completely nullifying the need for overtime.

The Result - an optimized workflow with departmental areas of content and revision responsibility.

The old workflow mandated an average of 770 overtime hours within the Design department per 90-day proposal creation cycle. Under the new optimized workflow, Omega conservatively expects to reduce overtime hours to less than 50.

The nature of the Omega proposal team’s work—creating time-sensitive proposals to help Omega secure commercial and industrial buildings and land development contracts—is such that, no matter how optimized the workflow, a project cannot be delivered to its recipient too far ahead of deadline. While every salaried employee will appreciate the reduction in overtime, the time savings now realized will not translate into sending proposals out early. Instead, the real value to Omega in its optimized workflow is more time to get it right. By removing the bottleneck for changes at the door to the Design department, Accounting can include the very latest figures based on market climate; Engineering can spend more time on the detail of their schematics, plans, and conceptual illustrations; Copywriting can carefully choose and fit every word; Design can spend more time creating compelling layouts and original artwork, and; everyone involved has the time to make the proposal perfect.

Because the workflow was transformed mid-stream, accurate time and budget savings resulting from the workflow optimization could not be fully quantified. Varying portions of the individual departments’ content had already been created under the previous methodologies and laid out in InDesign CS, and only new content and revision of existing content was incorporated into the optimized workflow.

Omega’s original request for consultation anticipated my return to Omega at thirty day intervals over the ninety day workflow transformation process. During the second visit I would have introduced the workflow to Copywriting, Accounting, and Engineering team members and train them to expert level in it. During the third visit Omega hoped to have me troubleshoot technical issues and pain points that arose during the previous month and to tweak the workflow as needed. Because we decided midweek to change the plan and deploy on the spot, and because of the manner of execution I chose, seven days took the place of 90.

Since the on-site workflow optimization a few months ago, I have answered a few how-to questions from Omega personnel via telephone and e-mail, and delivered several scripts to assist with certain repetitive tasks in InDesign and InCopy (the scripts had been part of the optimization plan all along, but were not ready at the accelerated deployment time). I have not, however, had to return to Omega—although I hope to visit for lunch soon.

At press time, Omega expects to begin work on its first fully collaborative proposal under the optimized workflow before year’s end.

Footnote: Omega won the US$198 million contract for the project proposed during the workflow optimization.

InCopy CS2: In Production 6-Part Special Report:

Part 1: [2] InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2

Part 2: [3] A Newsletter Designer Looks At InCopy CS2

Part 4: [4] How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: The Designer

InDesign, InCopy, InDesign CS2, InCopy CS2, Adobe, Microsoft Word