Thomson Holidays, a division of TUI UK, has successfully implemented a Media Mogul digital asset management (DAM) solution, from Picdar, to centralise their image content in-house and automate the production and deployment of content for both web and conventional print. The solution has reduced publishing cycle times by as much as four weeks and has enabled Thomson to publish its brochures and to its multiple websites with ease. At the same time, they have been able to deliver significant six figure annual cost savings back to the business.

We were spending significant six figure sums annually with our repro house to convert our low-res Quark pages to print. All of those costs have now been removed, said Ali Jarman, Content Manager, TUI UK.

To sell holiday packages, TUI relies heavily on brochures and an ever-growing internet presence. Said Ali Jarman, The main reason for buying Picdar s Media Mogul was to have all our images in one place with the flexibility to have them in whatever format we wanted, and then use them wherever we wanted to without paying to retrieve them.

Brochures are TUI s main selling tool and a lot of effort goes into producing them. Traditionally, TUI carried out the majority of the publishing work in-house but used a repro house to convert low-res Quark pages to high-res files for print. For practical reasons this meant having huge amounts of images physically off-site, which was costly and prevented TUI from making full use of its content outside of its brochures.

An additional challenge was moving from the traditional brochure publishing environment and re-defining processes to enable the content management team to also support new media initiatives. Picdar s solution is seen as a strategic tool initially geared towards reducing the time it took brochure content to be deployed on line.

TUI needed a technology that could manage the crossover between traditional publishing (using Quark XPress) and the web. It needed to comprehensively manage text and images together. An effective DAM solution was required to integrate with TUI s newly developed in-house content management system, called EPIC. Jarman added, We wanted something that was a reasonably good fit out of the box but enabled us to then add further specific functionality. A key requirement was to interface with other systems and to fit into the workflow we had designed.

Picdar s Media Mogul enabled TUI to bring all their high-res images in-house, giving it the flexibility to have them in whatever format was required and to publish them over and over again. These images are now available to other areas of the business.

A more automated process for the brochure production cycle has led directly to a reduction of up to four weeks in the time it takes to produce brochures, with production staff able to create pages more efficiently. This means the page production process can start later, allowing more time to finalise content and incorporate any necessary changes before pages are produced.

Having all content together in one place has not only allowed TUI the ability to simultaneously publish to paper and web, but also to offer more online. Lunnpoly.com was the first of the group websites to benefit from this new initiative., Another initiative is the new business launched by TUI, the web s best low cost holiday company , www.BudgetHolidays.com. The images for this website come from Media Mogul.

Media Mogul will soon open up access to the images through a web browser interface, which will be available to staff both in the UK and worldwide. At the moment, a full time administrator is fulfilling requests for images from around the business. With the new web system, TUI users will be able to search, select and dispatch images themselves. This will help with promotional activities by having images immediately available for publicity, magazines and newspapers.