Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2

The Result

Designers were at the cen­ter of the old Omega workflow–one design­er described it as “every­one whirls around us like an amuse­ment park ride–the clos­er we get to dead­line, the faster the whirling.” This work­flow forced the oth­er depart­ments to wait to see their request­ed changes. At the same time, the Design depart­ment had dif­fi­cul­ty con­cen­trat­ing on cre­at­ing new work with the con­stant inter­rup­tions and change requests. All extra-departmental con­tent had to be styled and moved numer­ous times, which dra­mat­i­cal­ly slowed down the entire doc­u­ment cre­ation process. Although struc­tur­al changes involv­ing page com­po­si­tion and loca­tion and num­ber of pages were still required from time to time, respon­si­bil­i­ty for the major­i­ty of mod­i­fi­ca­tions to exist­ing con­tent was no longer on the shoul­ders of the design­ers, result­ing in the elim­i­na­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 40% of their dai­ly tasks, and almost com­plete­ly nul­li­fy­ing the need for overtime.

The Result – an opti­mized work­flow with depart­men­tal areas of con­tent and revi­sion responsibility.

The old work­flow man­dat­ed an aver­age of 770 over­time hours with­in the Design depart­ment per 90-day pro­pos­al cre­ation cycle. Under the new opti­mized work­flow, Omega con­ser­v­a­tive­ly expects to reduce over­time hours to less than 50.

The nature of the Omega pro­pos­al team’s work–creating time-sensitive pro­pos­als to help Omega secure com­mer­cial and indus­tri­al build­ings and land devel­op­ment contracts–is such that, no mat­ter how opti­mized the work­flow, a project can­not be deliv­ered to its recip­i­ent too far ahead of dead­line. While every salaried employ­ee will appre­ci­ate the reduc­tion in over­time, the time sav­ings now real­ized will not trans­late into send­ing pro­pos­als out ear­ly. Instead, the real val­ue to Omega in its opti­mized work­flow is more time to get it right. By remov­ing the bot­tle­neck for changes at the door to the Design depart­ment, Accounting can include the very lat­est fig­ures based on mar­ket cli­mate; Engineering can spend more time on the detail of their schemat­ics, plans, and con­cep­tu­al illus­tra­tions; Copywriting can care­ful­ly choose and fit every word; Design can spend more time cre­at­ing com­pelling lay­outs and orig­i­nal art­work, and; every­one involved has the time to make the pro­pos­al perfect.

Because the work­flow was trans­formed mid-stream, accu­rate time and bud­get sav­ings result­ing from the work­flow opti­miza­tion could not be ful­ly quan­ti­fied. Varying por­tions of the indi­vid­ual depart­ments’ con­tent had already been cre­at­ed under the pre­vi­ous method­olo­gies and laid out in InDesign CS, and only new con­tent and revi­sion of exist­ing con­tent was incor­po­rat­ed into the opti­mized workflow.

Omega’s orig­i­nal request for con­sul­ta­tion antic­i­pat­ed my return to Omega at thir­ty day inter­vals over the nine­ty day work­flow trans­for­ma­tion process. During the sec­ond vis­it I would have intro­duced the work­flow to Copywriting, Accounting, and Engineering team mem­bers and train them to expert lev­el in it. During the third vis­it Omega hoped to have me trou­bleshoot tech­ni­cal issues and pain points that arose dur­ing the pre­vi­ous month and to tweak the work­flow as need­ed. Because we decid­ed mid­week to change the plan and deploy on the spot, and because of the man­ner of exe­cu­tion I chose, sev­en days took the place of 90.

Since the on-site work­flow opti­miza­tion a few months ago, I have answered a few how-to ques­tions from Omega per­son­nel via tele­phone and e‑mail, and deliv­ered sev­er­al scripts to assist with cer­tain repet­i­tive tasks in InDesign and InCopy (the scripts had been part of the opti­miza­tion plan all along, but were not ready at the accel­er­at­ed deploy­ment time). I have not, how­ev­er, had to return to Omega–although I hope to vis­it for lunch soon.

At press time, Omega expects to begin work on its first ful­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­pos­al under the opti­mized work­flow before year’s end.

Footnote: Omega won the US$198 mil­lion con­tract for the project pro­posed dur­ing the work­flow optimization.

InCopy CS2: In Production 6‑Part Special Report:

Part 1: InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2

Part 2: A Newsletter Designer Looks At InCopy CS2

Part 4: How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: The Designer

InDesign, InCopy, InDesign CS2, InCopy CS2, Adobe, Microsoft Word