Our customer is a specialist magazine publisher based in the UK. Over the past few years there has been an increase in demand for online subscriptions which has resulted in the use of multiple software solutions to manage digital sales.
The Problem
With the increase in digital subscription sales the company needed to improve their reporting of total sales. Digital subscription sales data was accessed directly from the subscription services web sites, this was then manually keyed, weekly, into their circulation system.
The Solution
Following a short requirements meeting, where the customer explained their manual process, it was agreed that they would request the export of digital sales data from their various subscription services. SP Data Services then developed a utility to import the weekly digital sales figures, handling the different file formats from the different systems. To ease reporting, the customer also requested that SP Data Services build in a total sales report, creating a pdf breakdown of print and digital sales figures.
Summary
The delivered solution reduced the time spent keying in digital sales figures, removed keying errors and saved the customer report development time. This solutions saved a day of report development and 2 to 3 hours a week of manual data entry.
