The client is an electronic publishing company that provides online technology solutions to the media industry in the United States. The client repurposes advertising print content for online publishing for over 300 newspapers across the US.

Advertisements in the US increasingly need to be available for both print and electronic (internet) consumption. Furthermore, the online advertisements need to be available when the print version reaches the readers. The client needed to repurpose the print ads into online rich text searchable advertisements and as they were catering to over 300 newspapers across the US, they had to manage the huge volumes in a time- bound environment without increasing internal resources and costs.

Firstsource not only provided the time difference advantage, its publishing BPO practice brought in high quality and innovative workflow technologies/mechanisms, to provide a cost effective solution to the client. This helped the client manage high volumes and focus on growing their business further.

Firstsource transitioned the process as-is and started performing this work using a dedicated team out of its facilities in India. The operation started with the processing of around 4000 ads per month which continued for almost one and half years with a marked improvement on quality and on-time deliveries.

During the course of the project, the volume of production increased significantly, and this required Firstsource to manage these volumes. Due to technology limitations at the clients end, Firstsource had to overcome issues like client system downtime and network latency, that resulted in production losses as it affected the overall productivity of the operations.

Firstsource understood the challenges and created a solution to address these issues. The solution included:

• Technology - Firstsource invested in technology and developed a proprietary platform which pulled all the work from client’s online system in real-time. This offline mode allowed the workforce to operate without fully depending on the client system and hence overcoming any delays due to latency and system downtime
• Unique workflow distribution environment - Firstsource created an environment where it brought in workflow and assembly-line manufacturing concepts to the operations floor. The work was distributed across multiple locations where the operational staff would download the ads, pull out keywords/phrases and classified the ads on client specific parameters and update systems. The system was very flexible and highly productive as the work was distributed in a way that multiple people could work on a single ad at the same time thereby increasing productivity
• Scalability and flexibility– Accurate forecasting and scheduling was done on an hourly basis which enabled Firstsource to handle different volumes of data at different intervals of time and on different days of the week

Firstsource converted the client’s business into a very powerful, scalable, cost effective and distributed operational model:

• Allowed the client to ramp up from 4,000 ads per month, 3 years ago, to a current run-rate of 250,000 ads per month
• Firstsource provides 100% TAT which has enabled the client to create and place advertisements on their online portal before the print newspapers reach the end customers
• Converting the online ad creation to offline format has resulted in productivity improvement of over 50%(from 8.5 items per hour to 12.9 items per hour)
• Highly accurate classification gives the client the ability to highlight individual items from within multiple item ads listed on their online portal