Hi, I'm Greg Goldman from intellapath in the GMG Consulting Group.  I'll tell you WhatTheyThink has asked me to elaborate a little bit on a project that I am working on with David Zwang and this is with regards to a project that we're working on in Asia Pacific with a large commercial publisher, book publisher and what we're really doing there is going in to that organization and figuring out how do we take orders that are coming in from American publishers that are being produced in Asia Pacific.

We were brought in originally because of the changes in their business.  Over in Asia Pacific, what they're finding is that wages are starting to rise and what they're trying to do, like we are here in the United States, is doing more with less.  So what we essentially are going through their organization and starting with their MIS system figuring out how can I get an order that gets dropped on an FTP site with an XML order stream and essentially take that in to the MIS system and get the production work moving almost simultaneously as the job information is being created in the MIS system.

We found that it's actually easier to get the production work done quicker if the MIS system is connected directly to the XML order feed that's coming in from the American publisher.  So we've done that by integrating a bunch of tools and that enables both sides of the fence, the business management portion of the fence and the production side of the fence, to almost work simultaneously.

And what we've done is actually cut the amount of time that a job can be submitted by a customer and get immediately feedback with emails back to that customer, but more importantly get the production people – the information that they need to actually start that job in to manufacturing.

Often people ask me how do I use a consulting firm to improve my business.  I think what I find is you have a number of challenges within the printing and publishing industry today and what we really try to do is go in, again, analyze what pieces of the puzzle you're working with, but more importantly what I find is the biggest challenge for everyone today is how do you integrate these pieces together.  And it's not so much the pieces of technology, but what is the glue, for example, that is used to connect MIS systems to manufacturing production systems.