ASG-Cypress™: Tribune Improves Productivity with Automated Report Distribution
Industry: Media and Entertainment
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Tribune is one of the country’s top media companies, operating businesses in publishing and broadcasting. Reaching more than 80% of U.S. households, Tribune is the only media organization with newspapers, television stations, and Web sites in the nation’s top three markets. In publishing, Tribune operates 11 leading daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday, along with a wide range of targeted publications. The company’s broadcasting group operates 25 television stations, including Superstation WGN on national cable, as well as Chicago’s WGN-AM, and the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Popular news and information Web sites complement Tribune’s print and broadcast properties and extend the company’s nationwide audience.
Business Challenge
Like all organizations, Tribune is faced with operating as efficiently as possible in a world of
ever changing requirements, technology, and enterprise applications. To automate business
processes, Tribune uses the popular Oracle ERP application PeopleSoft to manage daily
financial reporting and human resources activities. For Tribune, PeopleSoft generates
tremendous amounts of information and along with it, the challenge of effectively managing
and disseminating that information across various business entities in a timely manner.
As an initial solution for capturing and storing the volumes of reports generated from PeopleSoft, Tribune’s IT team was tasked with developing an in-house solution for report distribution. However, as the PeopleSoft application evolved, Tribune's in-house solution also required additional development efforts to keep up with the application changes. Further, Tribune was experiencing end-user aggravation when it lost the capability to automatically print reports to the local printer as a result of a PeopleSoft upgrade.
To minimize the costly development effort for upgrades and resources required to maintain a homegrown solution, increase end-user satisfaction, and maximize productivity, Tribune decided to move to an automated report distribution solution from an experienced vendor. In a single solution, Tribune’s requirements included the ability to run and store reports once, parse and index reports, secure reports at a page level, select reports based upon user criteria, view reports based upon user authorizations, and automatically print and purge reports. Equally important, Tribune required a flexible solution that would evolve, change, and expand as its business grew.
ASG Solution
In an effort to find the best fit for its operations, Tribune conducted a broad search and evaluated a number of solutions from a variety of vendors. To ensure success, ASG worked with Tribune to perform a proof of concept in their environment. During the proof of concept, it became clear that
ASG-Cypress™ was not only the more flexible solution, but easier to implement and maintain than the competition, satisfying needs beyond their original scope. Tribune ultimately selected ASG-Cypress as the solution as it enabled the organization to dynamically make updates to user access as employees changed roles; Tribune saw the limitations of traditional file and folder-based technology as well as the benefits of an open indexing system. ASG-Cypress’ dynamic, content-based indexing allowed Tribune employees to access reports based on intelligent searching, requiring the user to simply know what they were looking for, rather than guessing which folder an administrator may have filed their document.
“ASG-Cypress has become Tribune’s strategic platform for report distribution because of its ease of use, administration, and automated indexing capability. It is one tool and one place for disparate users and departments to access or view a report,” said Phil Elliott, Tribune’s Director of Financial and HR Systems.
During the initial implementation, ASG-Cypress was only used to help distribute PeopleSoft financials and HR reports to choice Tribune employees and managers, reaching approximately 1,500 users by e-mail, electronic inboxes, or printed output. After proven success with the initial deployment, ASG-Cypress' use was expanded to include every departmental manager to assist in the verification that payroll reporting is accurate — a critical Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance requirement. ASG-Cypress has assisted the auditing department with other SOX initiatives as well. Each department within Tribune regularly generates approximately 20 unique documents that must easily be audited at a moment’s notice. The flexibility of the ASG-Cypress application permitted Tribune to capture auditing statistics, allowing auditors to quickly answer the “who, what, where, when” questions surrounding document access.
Measurable Results
“ASG-Cypress has improved employee productivity as reports are automatically generated and employees do not have to waste time searching for reports,” said Elliot.
Tribune has enjoyed measurable success with ASG-Cypress, which provides the organization with a streamlined solution and single storage for its vast archive of reports. Usage of ASG-Cypress has increased dramatically, reaching more than 3,000 users – an increase of 100% since initial implementation. Tribune’s employees are excited because ASG-Cypress has all but eliminated the manual efforts associated with physically distributing and printing reports. The finance team now has its reports automatically prepared and printed first thing each morning, allowing it to be more proactive in identifying possible errors.
Tribune estimates it saves $100-$200k annually thanks to ASG-Cypress, primarily due to efficiency gains. With each upgrade to PeopleSoft, the organization now avoids several months of development costs associated with modifying its custom-built solution, resulting in savings of $30-$40k per upgrade project. In addition, Tribune’s internal audit team has reallocated one full-time employee to more mission-critical tasks thanks to the minimized effort required for administering and tracking SOX documentation.
As a result of positive feedback and the proven flexibility, performance, and scalability of ASG-Cypress, Tribune is planning to move all reports from its historical distribution systems to ASG-Cypress in the near future. Reports from the advertising data warehouse and sales metrics will also be added to the ASG-Cypress implementation to provide personalized report views based on job function. Easily ingesting more than 60,000 reports per month, ASG-Cypress is well positioned to handle the increased workload.
