Virtusales Publishing Solutions delivers large-scale data consolidation project for Xander Uitgevers on a very short timeline
Virtusales has successfully completed a complex data consolidation project for Xander Uitgevers – to budget and on-time – in just 5 months, delivering a comprehensive royalty management system that enabled the publisher to close its royalty period and begin sending its royalty statements within 22 weeks of the project’s start date.
This challenging and exceptional project, commencing just 22-25 weeks before the publisher needed its royalty run to go live, saw Virtusales Publishing Solutions and Xander Uitgevers working collaboratively to feed 1200 contracts into the BiblioSuite system. This project involved the analysis and conversion of legacy, disparate data sources – including the import of its ONIX product data and sales data from Centraal Boekhuis, and the extraction of data from the aforementioned 1200 contracts, which were all presented in separate Excel spreadsheets – into a single, structured data format that could be readily ingested by BiblioSuite; all within a very short time frame, and with limited resources.
With no previous royalties system to speak of and the publisher focussed on its day-to-day business, Xander Uitgevers commissioned Virtusales to conduct the intricate, large-scale consolidation and data cleansing processes on its behalf; and our expert team swept in to meet this challenge, developing a bespoke program with custom code that enabled the publisher to meticulously unify its data into a single, standardized and all-encompassing structure. In doing so, Virtusales provided Xander Uitgevers with a more manageable version of truth for its data, ready for its ingestion into BiblioSuite; lifted the quality and accuracy of the publisher’s data; and ultimately enabled the publisher to consolidate its payee data and royalty rules respectively – in record time – to determine the royalties due.
Typically, a project of this scale would take 9 months or more to complete, with the publisher conducting its own data cleansing exercise; and the workload would be entirely manual, labor-intensive and extremely time-consuming. Virtusales’ bespoke program helped to fasttrack the project, automating and streamlining the consolidation process, thereby saving Xander Uitgevers both time and resources, and bringing down its costs overall. As such, this was a highly successful, high pressure project that proved the skill and agility of the Virtusales team.
“We are so grateful to Virtusales for their expertise in delivering this project. The team was incredibly helpful throughout and a joy to work with. Thanks to Virtusales’ professionalism and the team’s publishing prowess, we did the impossible and we now have a high speed, fully scalable royalty system that is capable of handling even the most complex royalty calculations and payments for our products.”
Sander Knol, Director, Publisher, Xander Uitgevers
“We saved so much time and resources on this project by joining forces with the Virtusales team! Had it not been for Virtusales’ involvement, we would almost certainly still be manually working our way through our contracts to this date. Instead, we now have a fully functional royalties system, designed specifically for publishers, that allows us to complete our royalty runs on-demand and in real-time. What a difference one project can make!”
Martien Elema, Project Support, BiblioSuite, Xander Uitgevers
“It has been great working with Xander Uitgevers’ small but agile team over the past 5 months, and we’ve really enjoyed the challenging nature of this project. Virtusales is proud to have successfully delivered this project, on time and to budget.”
Erdem Sagiroglu, Managing Director, Europe, Virtusales GmbH
About Xander Uitgevers
Xander Uitgevers offers books for everyone and shows readers, writers and booksellers that the modern reader's taste is varied and exciting. Xander offers a remarkably versatile range of books aimed at everyone who loves to read. Whether a bloodcurdling thriller, a breathtaking novel or a popular and surprising non-fiction book, Xander books have their own unique value and character. We reflect the Dutch and Flemish modern reader's taste with clear choices, the best authors, a varied offering of accessible books and inviting pricing.
Xander Uitgevers is devoted to the craftsmanship of each book it publishes in order to achieve the highest possible results: superior discoveries, superior buying experiences, and superior reading experiences.
About BiblioSuite
BiblioSuite offers growing publishers the opportunity to implement tried-and-tested, digital workflows that have been developed in collaboration with world-leading publishers, to streamline their processes and increase their output without increasing their number of employees. It enables content-led publishing models, helping publishers to fully utilize their IP and maximize their income regardless of the publishing formats chosen. Biblio users are therefore free to focus on growing their business in the sound mind that all their data, assets and essential documentation – from editorial right the way through to rights and royalties – are being recorded and stored in a way which will better the performance of the business, and will increase effective communications (both internally and externally, with staff, business partners, authors and agents alike).
BiblioSuite is proven to help publishing houses of all shapes and sizes to save time, reduce duplication of efforts and increase the access to key information and documents company-wide. The only difficulty after implementing will be deciding what to do with the time you’ve freed up!
By choosing Biblio’s comprehensive system, your publishing house will be able to:
Manage multiple formats including books, e-books, audiobooks, packs and bundles (including non-book products), licenses and merchandise;
Easily maintain high-quality metadata and enhanced ONIX feeds;
Generate and authorize contracts with software that enables full rights management;
Create costings and schedules for production;
Raise purchase orders within the Biblio system;
Handle complex royalty calculations and payments;
And much, much more.
About Virtusales Publishing Solutions
Virtusales is the creator of industry-leading BiblioSuite publishing software. Working with some of the world's leading trade, children’s and novelty, academic and scholarly, educational and professional, content and licensing, and religious publishers including Penguin Random House, Faber, Oxford University Press, Hachette, Bloomsbury and Macmillan Publishers, Virtusales is streamlining publishers' workflows and bringing efficiencies to their business processes with innovative software, exceptional service and a collaborative approach.
Our leading-edge, web-based technology, rapid development cycle of new functionality and close working relationships with our customers ensure that our client publishers are able to manage and adapt to the industry's challenges more efficiently, now and in the future.
Find out more here or contact us for further information.
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