Archant is the UK's largest independently-owned regional media business. It is a community media company active in the fields of regional newspaper and magazine publishing, contract printing and internet communications. All its titles serve clearly defined communities, based around locations or interest groups. Archant can trace its roots back over 160 years and today remains one of the country’s largest independent media businesses. As a private company it employs 1850 people right across England. Its head office is in Norwich and has an annual turnover of £142 million.
Business Problem
Archant’s processes for initiating an advertisement, approving images and content, and sending a final ad to the Production team for publishing were excessively manual and often paper-based. The company’s existing systems prevented the production and advertising side of Archant’s business from being nimble enough in collaborating with customers to produce high-quality content within strict production deadlines. The company sought a new solution to help increase agility, reduce errors, and deliver higher-quality customer service.
Appian BPM Solution
Archant initially evaluated niche Production Publishing Software vendors for a solution, but quickly decided to pursue BPM based on the value of deploying an enterprise-wide solution that could address multiple business process issues. Archant is currently using Appian within its Advertisement Design and Production processes to remove repetitive tasks, reduce its dependency on paper workflows, improve its engagement with both internal and external customers, improve work allocation and provide metrics on past and current performance. The company also plans to leverage the BPM platform in other process-driven areas of its business. Archant’s deployment was completed in ten weeks, enabled by a Proof-of-Concept demonstration of such quality that it was used to jump-start the actual solution implementation.
