Seikosha
Promotion
Sales Promotion
Business Customer
Seikosha
Seikosha (精興社) is a printing company with 100 years of history. By introducing latest printing, typesetting and desktop publishing (DTP) technologies, Seikosha always put their efforts into creating sophisticated publishing materials and providing readers an excellent reading experience. The readability and the design of books that Seikosha produced are highly beloved and complimented as high-quality artefacts. Besides offset printing, they are now applying some new tries including digitalization of transparency film, developing e-books industry, to satisfy the needs of nowadays customers.
Improved production productivity: DTP workflow as a core system
CIERTO provides the integration of production, customers and communication environment
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Data management for over 100TB/1million files
The main business for Seikosha is publishing books and general printing materials (e.g. poster). It is important to manage the publishing data, no matter in print or out of print carefully, as reprint/reissue are common in printing industry. Before having CIERTO, Seikosha did not possess a comprehensive data management system and it is difficult for them to manage the materials well. But in 20 years ago, they introduced ""Turbo Server"", the predecessor of CIERTO, which they can now manage 1 million data file exceeding 100TB. ※ Seikosha is still implementing CIERTO after the system renewal.
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Production workflow involving internal and external stakeholders
The production flow of Seikosha always involves internal and external stakeholders. In the time they were not using CIERTO (and its predecessor), all the stakeholders were applying different publishing methods, they were lacking of communication and hard to have a good production. For now, all the participants can just share all their information and comments on a single platform. Not only the improvement in communication, it also provided them an environment where they can work anytime and anywhere.
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SCALAB: improved the productivity and satisfied the customers
SCALAB (Seikosha Contents Aggregator LABoratory) is the dedicated version of CIERTO for Seikosha. It has become a core system of editing/production of Seikosha. not only providing data management or data delivery, SCALAB also satisified their customers and gave them added value in business. VPJ always evolves with the time, providing supporting system that can handle with the new working style of printing industry and needs of customers.
Reason why we chose CIERTO ｜ Interview with the customers
DTP workflow as a core system: A really nice try
We cooperated with VPJ since 2005. At the same time, we started "Project S" to create new business opportunities through "Single-source, Multi-use" approach. Although the style of printing industry changed, and the needs of customers changed by digitalization, the importance of data management remain unchanged. VPJ constantly adapting the ever-changing environment and strengthening their system, which is also a great contribution to our success of business. For the future CIERTO upgrade, we are now considering implementing NAS (Network Attached Storage) with snapshot function, to build a cost-effective but secure system. We are also hoping VPJ can add automation function for the movement between "Work" data and "Archive" data in the later version.
How we use CIERTO
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Guest Link and Improvement of Workflow
For those who do not have CIERTO account, we use "Guest Link" function to create a one-time link and provide them the permission of asset access. We create guest link to over 200 business customers everyday, it facilitated our online data upload/placement system. Guest Link is a simple (just click the URL and you can access the data), while secure function, which you can set different permissions, including "Preview Only" or "Allow Upload/Download". It satisfied the customers who are highly concerning the security issue, and accelerate our production workflow.
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Using Webhook for Instant Announcement
Webhook is a real-time announcement function when there is any renewal or special event on the system. We used to have another email announcement function but it took some time to receive the notice. But by using Webhook function on CIERTO, we can connect it with email or Slack and receive the notice through external platforms instantly. For example, after uploading the file, members will immediately receive an announcement with a confirming URL and information of the uploader. It lubricates our communication system by reducing the time to ask who uploaded/downloaded the data.
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Integration of Environment for Production and Communication with our Business Customers
The 3 main functions of SCALAB are "Work (Production in progress)", "Archive (Manage in-print data)" and "Data Delivery". For data delivery, we can upload/download the assets on Web browser or through mount access. Our creators usually register the data on CIERTO by mounting, and create the guest link of the file and share it to other stakeholders. At the same time, our business customers will access the registered data through guest link, and get the data by mounting too. The mounting/web browser operations simplified the workflow of production and communication.
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Backup and Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
As we have many successive customers, it is important to manage all the data properly. But at the same time, unexpected accidents or force majeure are unavoidable. Whether we can continue our business and protect the data while accidents occurred will be a big concern for our customers. Usually company will backup their data on cloud environment. However, we established a tape device, and chose NAS server of Synology, a company with a proven track record at VPJ to do the backup. These are the most cost-effective and secure choices for us, which ensure the integrity of the data and our business can run smoothly with NAS.
System We Provide
Digital Asset Management System