With nearly 50 million readers in the United States, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. is the New York-headquartered subsidiary of Hachette Filipacchi Médias., a major international publishing conglomerate. HFMUS sought to purchase an enterprise-wide digital asset management system for its staff to use to prepare material for publication in print, web, mobile, and other channels.

DPCI helped the company define a set of business goals for digital asset management that included the creation of automated workflows, better coordination with outside contributors and vendors, sharing with sister publications and international editions, more comprehensive archiving and integration with other systems throughout the enterprise. HFMUS then enlisted DPCI to recommend a DAM strategy and to identify a digital asset management system that would best suit the needs of all its brands.

With its proprietary Vendor Evaluation process, DPCI helped HFMUS manage vendor responses and narrow the list of 12 vendors to 4 finalists. Throughout the entire process, DPCI filtered RFP responses to enable HFMUS to compare the systems on standardized criteria, ensuring that the final selection was truly the best fit for HFMUS and was minimally influenced by vendor salesmanship.

Next, DPCI collaborated with HFMUS to manage a pilot implementation of North Plains TeleScope, the system that best supported HFMUS' requirements. DPCI's PMI-certified project management team helped to plan the pilot program, manage the timelines and deliverables of both HFMUS and the vendor, communicate and interpret stakeholder requirements for the vendor, elicit feedback from the stakeholders, and ensure that the implementation, including budget, schedule, scope and quality, was meeting management's objectives.

This pilot program allowed DPCI and HFMUS to explore the full feature set of the system, fine-tune the new digital asset management workflow and rollout strategy, and determine where custom development would be needed to provide functionality that was not supported out-of-the-box. It also provided a tested configuration that would be used as the baseline for rollout to other HFMUS brands.

With DPCI's magazine workflow, digital asset management and domain expertise, HFMUS had the dedicated partner they needed to bridge the gap between customer and vendor and to help HFMUS free up key resources to further define requirements across the brands and to focus on change management practices.

"Working with DPCI on our TeleScope digital asset management project has been such a pleasure. They've helped in every phase: strategy, discovery, selection, pilot, assessment, refinement, and rollout. The DPCI team makes a real point of understanding the use cases, discussing and testing them thoroughly until we reach a consensus on how to proceed. Yet the process has been quick because we haven't had to do much backtracking. There have been some magical moments of technological inspiration. It has all been enveloped in a sturdy and conscientious process. I've gotten spoiled into thinking that 'on time and on budget' is the norm." - John Dougherty, Director of Digital Technology