The staff at one of the world's leading music companies was singing in harmony - at least most of the time. The company discovers, develops, markets, and distributes recorded music through a worldwide network of subsidiaries, joint ventures, and licensees. Its core businesses of recorded music and music publishing were thriving, but its production department was paying the price for this success. Hundreds of incoming PDF files from myriad sources taxed the production department's workflow each day. The tipping point came when the IT department began to play a leading role in the creative department.

Ready to revamp its workflow operation, the music company turned to UK-based Tunicca, a pre-media business-process consultancy, for help. To solve the workflow bottleneck, Tunicca selected Apago's productivity tools PDF Enhancer and PDF Spy, along with Enfocus' Switch, which provides a visual interface to automate receiving and sorting the PDFs.

"Before implementing the Apago/Switch workflow, our client created and processed PDFs manually, and the IT department ruled the creative department," comments Gary George, a consultant with Tunicca. "With its ease of integration and powerful tool set, Apago's technology was a logical choice for our client's workflow. And best of all, it is affordably priced."

PDF Enhancer allows Tunnica to implement a batch workflow for the music company to automate the time-intensive task of manually fixing file issues one PDF at a time. The software automates the assembly, preparation, and optimization of PDFs for print, the Web, and archiving. Additionally, PDF Enhancer is fully integrated with Switch's simple drag-and-drop interface for workflow automation.

The manual task of information extraction on a file-by-file basis is accomplished in the streamlined workflow using PDF Spy, the ultimate "get info" utility. PDF Spy extracts the information from incoming PDFs and outputs the data in a reusable, searchable XML-based format, which Tunnica was able to parse with Enfocus Switch to make workflow decisions.

"Overall, the project saved about 2.8m Euro in three years," notes George. "The payback on the entire project was 20 months. It's clear that Apago's tools provide good value for the money."