Eidos Interfaces Methode with SAP R/3

By: E&P Staff EidosMedia, Milan, Italy, has interfaced its knowledge-management and publishing platform with SAP R/3 to create an integrated advertising-management system to handle all aspects of display and classified advertising, from booking and pagination to billing.

"Methode's advertising management isn't a booking and billing system," said EidosMedia Marketing Manager Michela Bertagnolli. "But it's been designed to interface easily with such systems by receiving placement parameters from ad bookings."

An example of such a system is the SAP R/3 Enterprise Software platform used by Brussels-based multimedia company IPM S.A. to manage display and classified ads in its three national dailies and one weekly.

Sales staff receives customers' bookings and enters date, size and positioning details into an SAP R/3 screen form. These parameters then generate an ad reserve file that enters the Methode workflow. Layout staff working on the pages where the ad is to appear will find the ad among the candidates for pagination in those pages and can drag it onto the page or allow it to be paginated automatically.

If the PDF file containing the ad content is available, the ad candidate will be displayed in full WYSIWYG mode; if not, staff can paginate a placeholder of the same dimensions, which is replaced automatically when the file becomes available. Methode also has been interfaced with Enfocus Pitstop Professional to validate PDF files' quality.

Some display and classified advertising is created by in-house staff on behalf of customers using Methode's XML-based pagination tool Xsmile. These layouts also enter the workflow as PDF files with associated ad reserve files.

IPM's implementation even handles small, private-party classifieds. Staff type the wording into an Xsmile template and the cost is calculated immediately for a cash sale. A PDF of the ad is then added to a cumulative XML file of small ads, which is subsequently sorted and segmented before pagination. Following publication, Methode generates reports that can verify if ads appeared in the specified position and section.