One-Stop Swapping

Sears talks shop about its customized, unified solution for asset management and image replacement.Quick: Name a product that you can't get from Sears, Roebuck and Co. Need a minute to think of one? That's not surprising. The Hoffman Estates, IL-based mega-retailer aims to create a one-stop shopping environment, offering everything from appliances, apparel and automotive goods to tools, toys and high-tech merchandise. Not bad for a company founded simply to sell watches.Of course, people can't buy all of these commodities unless they know they're available. To that end, Sears utilizes the standard vehicles for marketing and promotion, including print. Enter the company's retail printing department, which produces four-color newspaper inserts and whole-house mailers, so named because they promote the majority of Sears' departments in a single printed piece. John Vitellaro, national buyer, retail printing, calculates that Sears produces approximately 14 million mailers seven or eight times annually, and between 100 and 150 million preprints weekly.That's a lot of print pieces, and each job layout contains numerous product shots. No wonder that Sears has spent nearly a decade perfecting a system for image storage and management.In 1991, Vitellaro began searching for someone or something to manage what he calls Sears' "digital equity," but he couldn't find any takers. So he cobbled together a makeshift solution. "We initially used three different separators to store our images. Each had a lot of images, and some of our images were stored at more than one location. But no one [supplier] had everything," Vitellaro recalls. "Having 'triplicity' gave us security in case a separator went out of business or we stopped working with one of them."The vendors included the image storage costs in their overall fee. "We were charged one price for a page of separation, and part and parcel of that price was storage of those images," he remembers. "The only extra charge would be to transfer an image to one of the other separators."At that time, we hadn't even considered retrieving images for repurposing," he notes. "It wasn't until Sears started [marketing] Craftsman tools on the Internet that the three databases were tapped to provide low-res images for use on the Web." One for all, all for oneSears made the best of its three-for-one situation for several years. But, by 1996, the databases were populated with about 35,000 images, and Vitellaro recognized a serious need for consolidation. "[Working with three databases] was becoming cumbersome, so I began looking for what I called a master master database," he recounts. "I also realized that I needed … to develop a solution that could serve any [function] within Sears, rather than just advertising."He wasn't immediately successful; Sears' needs were too great. Then, while evaluating the WAM!NET digital file transfer solution, Vitellaro discovered WAM!NET's WAM!BASE digital asset management service. WAM!BASE is a central storage infrastructure accessed via the global WAM!NET secure private network. As Vitellaro considered WAM!-BASE, all of a sudden, he was inundated with other options. "As you know, digital asset management became en vogue," he recalls. "I was barraged by calls from vendors, but I felt that most of the solutions offered were rudimentary or worse."On the other hand, I really liked WAM!BASE's pricing model [monthly charges based on usage, with no hardware investment], which allowed me to create a solution without having to go senior management to ask for capital. Also, we could leverage volume to get even-more-competitive pricing, plus we would have the ability to transfer images via WAM!NET's T-1 circuits."By the end of 1997, Sears decided to implement WAM!BASE as a single, centralized image database. Since WAM!BASE features redundant storage centers in Minneapolis and Las Vegas, the company didn't have to worry about losing images.Work with meVitellaro and WAM!NET determined that Sears needed a custom solution that would accommodate the company's unique workflow requirements. "Sears doesn't produce the creative internally, but rather, outsources it to ABD Creative Group [in Chicago]," Vitellaro reveals. "We are their sole client."In addition, ABD uses proprietary electronic systems that handle Sears' merchandising and pricing issues, among others. "The master master database had to interface with ABD's workflow systems and function within those parameters," he states. In addition, Vitellaro wanted the solution to facilitate the transmission of accurate, complete page files. "The nice thing about an analog workflow was that you could be almost certain that the entire page was sent," he reminisces. "The digital age brought in a new set of dynamics. It's easy to send files that are missing elements—high-res images, for example. It can take a tremendous effort to pull pages back together."Working with WAM!NET's professional services group, Eric Zygowicz, ABD's production manager, and Vitellaro specified the criteria for the solution. The end result: WAM!BASE with a custom-designed interface called ACO (automatic collect for output). Sears and ABD have been using the solution for live jobs since May. For a typical print job, ABD captures images digitally or conventionally, sends the film-based shots out for scanning, then retains the FPO images locally and stores the high-res images in WAM!BASE.ABD sends pages via WAM!NET to the prepress service provider, either Quebecor World or The Black Dot Group. It employs the ACO interface to build a single package that contains the QuarkXPress file with low-res images. Then, ACO bundles the corresponding high-res files, which are retrieved automatically from WAM!BASE, into the same package. When the package arrives at the separator, the Quark file is re-linked to the high-res images. A single page may have 20 or more images, Vitellaro notes. Special naming conventions facilitate the image search and swap process. ABD labels each image with an alpha and numerical code up to 13 characters. The code indicates the division the product is from, the stock number, the date of the ad and the page on which the image ran, along with other information. High-res images are sent as JPEGs. "When the prepress supplier opens the page, the images decompress automatically," Vitellaro explains. "If, however, the system can't find the high-res image, the page will not be sent and ABD receives an e-mail notification that the transfer was not completed." Add and subtractVitellaro estimates that Sears and ABD are sending pages through the ACO/WAM!BASE solution at a rate of 8,000 per year. "We add new images to the database daily," he says. "Then, as images are no longer necessary, we dump them. An image will be stored no longer than one year if it has not been used."Still, we have tens of thousands of images in the database at any given time," he comments. "ABD is the only entity authorized to put images into WAM!BASE, which provides an extra measure of security."According to Vitellaro, this solution has satisfied all of Sears' initial requirements, plus it has resulted in time savings and faster turnaround. "WAM!NET and WAM!BASE save us at least four days in production for each piece," he declares. "We don't have to transfer images back and forth between engravers anymore, and we don't have to resend pages that were incomplete." -Dawn Greenlaw

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