by Claudina Perez, Marketing Coordinator, Enfocus
Our Enfocus marketing team decided to go out and shoot some videos of a customer story about using Switch. Among the most important of our customer brand names, I found El País. Spanish being my mother tongue, I was immediately impressed and recognizing one of the most important newspapers for Spain and Latinamerica. Fortunately for me, the decision was made to go visit them in Madrid! I was very excited about the opportunity to get to know a bit more about the Switch achievements in such a big company.
We arrived in Madrid at the offices of Prisa Noticias, which is the editorial group that operates the main titles: El País, AS - the sports newspaper, and Cinco Días - the financial newspaper. We were received by Victor Corchado Rincón, head of Production and Printing Systems at Prisa Tecnología. Later we were also joined by Manuel Asorey, Enfocus channel partner in Spain (if you want to see more visit eps.es). Both are incredibly friendly people. The strong cordial relationship between Victor and Manuel became evident throughout the day, which seems obvious after so many years of working together. But after having worked for a longer time at Enfocus, I’ve actually come to appreciate that there is just some sort of complicity between people that work with Switch. It is finally a whole universe they share the knowledge about and that occupates a big chunk of their life and work.
During the production of the video, Victor explained how they use Switch to manage all processes related to production, editorial prepress for the main titles, and all products of Prisa Noticias. They started using Switch more than 15 years ago. Since then, they have been perfecting processes and have finally reached full automation. They started by building around 30 workflows and currently they have between 170 and 180 active flows, running simultaneously on the platform. Over the years, they have implemented Switch for new products of Prisa Noticias and integrated new technologies and third-party applications to improve each flow. Because ultimately, that is what Switch is best at doing, integrating with everything.
Victor accredited the Switch platform as being the key product that allowed the exchange of content between all different work units, such as redaction, photography, and others. Covering the whole process, even beyond print, by automating other types of news services like digital kiosks, Kindle edition paid subscriptions, and uploading content to Amazon S3 buckets.
Switch was used to create a single ecosystem for Prisa Noticias’ challenging workflows. Some of the advantages mentioned during our conversation were:
- The visibility it provides overall processes - information is knowledge and knowledge is power
- The profitability it brings by automating all processes and therefore enabling higher performance
- The reliability that Switch provides - trustworthiness that will save some years of stress, and gray hair, to whoever works in the production department
At the end of the interview, we asked, “Can we see some of the members of your team working with Switch?” His answer amazed me. “No, flows are already built and running.” So nobody needs to be working on anything other than monitoring for issues, which also allows employees to dedicate themselves to other tasks with higher value.
Visiting Prisa Noticias was a very informative experience. Technology and automation have taken over so many processes during the last decades and it is amazing to see old newspapers adapt to the new trends. Not by depending on their initial activity, which was print, but by always maintaining their essence of delivering news to the public in whatever the newest medium is to come along. Moreover, by perfecting their processes to maximum capacity, reaching the ideal simplicity, eliminating waste, and reducing errors to a minimum. Switch has demonstrated once more its ability to triumph in automation and scalability. I cannot wait to see what Switch will do in 15 more years!
