The People’s Education Press

Over the years, the PEP has relied increasingly on digital content in the creation of its educational materials, from images, video, and audio to electronic versions of printed content. However, supporting and managing these diverse digital assets became a growing challenge for the organization. The existing systems and processes were not designed to manage multimedia assets. As time passed, the lack of a centralized platform to efficiently and securely manage digital content became a significant barrier to streamlining and digitizing the PEP’s publishing processes. The organization also recognized that, if traditional manual publishing processes could be digitized, valuable business insight could be derived from the massive amounts of ‘big data’ that would become accessible for analysis.

Keeping pace with digital technology

Determined to overcome these challenges, the People’s Education Press embarked on an innovative digital asset management (DAM) initiative that would break new ground for the publishing industry in China. After rigorous assessment and validation of program and resource requirements, the PEP selected OpenText to provide the foundation of a new platform to centralize management of content and support digital asset requirements such as topic selection, editing, review, and distribution. OpenText™ Digital Asset Management for SAP® Solutions helps organizations optimize media asset management, use, and distribution and integrates seamlessly with SAP to provide access to content from within business applications.

To round out the solution, the PEP unified the enterprise content management picture with OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions and kickstarted data-driven decision-making with advanced artificial intelligence in a pre-built machine learning and big data analytics platform using OpenText™ Magellan™.

A central repository to extend the value of digital assets

With a centralized repository and unified standards for managing content, the PEP’s digital assets can be efficiently and securely organized, stored, and delivered throughout the content lifecycle from creation to publishing. The DAM software makes it easy to search for assets through metadata tags and provides valuable insights about the files. Yuan Hu, Director of IT at the People’s Education Press, commented, “OpenText Extended ECM for SAP Solutions and OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions provide us a single source for all information. With their seamless integration with SAP, the OpenText solutions bridge content silos and intelligently automate business processes.”

The new platform is not only the new core of digital asset management at the PEP, it has also become one of the most important systems in the organization. Using comprehensive APIs, versatile integration frameworks, and a library of connectors, the solution integrates with the PEP’s various production and business applications, including ERP, typesetting, video and audio editing, office automation, digital libraries, and print production systems, to achieve unified management of its content.

In addition, the OpenText solution provides critical access control with user authentication and authorization to ensure seamless and secure use of the application. With powerful asset-level security, the system ensures each user accesses only the assets and functions they should. Encryption and authorization of digital documents downloaded from the DAM platform ensures the legal application of that content and protects the associated copyrights.

A further benefit of the new platform is that the PEP’s valuable digital assets can be accessed by creative teams and business users across the organization and even by external organizations, allowing for enhanced collaboration and cooperation. Also a priority for the publisher was the ability to unlock insights derived from its data. For example, the PEP plans to leverage OpenText Magellan for data analytics related to the People’s Education and Social Sciences textbooks. Using the artificial intelligence and big data technology solution will accelerate easy retrieval of course content, intelligent analysis and research of the teaching materials and public opinion reports.

A future driven by innovation

With the OpenText solution fully deployed and content centralized in the DAM repository, the PEP’s production and publishing processes have evolved and gained efficiencies leading to increased business output. Business departments are increasingly applying data insight to improve decision-making and optimized business decisions. As an international publishing house well-known throughout the world and the leading textbook publisher in China, the PEP’s DAM initiative has resulted in an innovative media promotion and publishing platform that drives publishing in China and promotes the spirit of collaboration and education.