OptimIT

Since 2001, Styria International has been active on the Croatian market as part of the Austrian media group Styria Media Group AG. In addition to printed periodicals such as Večernji List, 24 SATA, 24 SATA Express and Poslovni dnevnik, Styria International publishes on the news portals (24sata.hr, vecernji.hr, poslovni.hr) and specialized websites and portals (njuskalo.hr, klokanica.hr, zdravakrava.hr, gastro.hr and others).

Editorial staff of daily newspapers Večernji list and 24SATA had difficulties processing large number of published articles from various journalists in order to evaluate their productivity. The editor was tasked with evaluation and rating of all published articles which represented significant recurring daily workload. Collected ratings were used as a basis for author’s salaries and compensations.

Collecting and processing journalist article ratings also presented a significant workload on human resources and financial services. The customer, therefore, requested a suitable system that would provide journalist key performance indicators while minimizing workload of key users. CGA facilitated and accelerated the process of evaluating journalists and allowed the production of various reports – from financial to narrative – for example, number of published articles in the past month, article grades etc.

Styria Croatia used the SAP Enterprise Portal at the time, which was used as primary application integration platform.

After 2012, the entire system, with its functionalities and required changes, was migrated, upon customer’s request, to Liferay portal platform.

The project involved development of a streamlined, simple support system for extracting published content in printed and online editions from existing editorial and content management systems. Imported content is classified and organized according to highly flexible rule-based subsystem with augmented metadata such as cost center, date, author, page set, edition. The collected information and ratings are presented to editors for evaluation. Their grades are collected and used as a basis for author’s evaluation and compensation. The system is fully integrated with SAP HR and payroll system.

SAP Enterprise Portal was first used for integration with SAP, but after 2012 we have successfully migrated existing information, evaluation logic and functionality to the standard Liferay open source portal.

Over the years many enhancements were added to the system, tracking changes of the ICT ecosystem, such as upgrades of SAP, migration to new editorial systems, integration of additional editions and content management systems, developing authors self-service portal. The Editor-in-Chief and his assistants use the database of pre-defined, embedded reports. All functionalities are available through the standard Liferay platform while users’ authorization and authentications are based on integration with LDAP/Active Directory solution.