THINK Innovation

Rahul Arora, Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited, who sponsor the ALPSP Awards for Innovation talks to us about innovation and their recent acquisition of THINK subscription.

 

 

Firstly, what are your thoughts on this year's awards finalists? What do they demonstrate about innovation in the industry.

 

This year's finalists showcase a diverse set of innovative thought, but two major themes stand out: collaborative information sharing, and creative analysis and dissemination of information.

 

Turning to Think Subscription are there any elements of this solution that are particularly innovative?

The THINK application offers an extensive and flexible range of subscription modeling including date-based, issue-based, and unit-based subscriptions, or a hybrid of date-based with issues or units.  This provides publishers with a tremendous capability to envision and develop new subscription offerings, while maintaining compliance with generally accepted accounting procedures and regulatory environments.

In addition, our extensive APIs allow publishers to deploy a true subscriber self-service environment, as well as the ability to extend the system and integrate with third-party applications. Such potential integrations include those with popular CRMs and finance applications. THINK offers a fully integrated E-Commerce & Content delivery platform called ScholarStor (an MPS proprietary platform) which includes various workflow options for open access, unit price, and pay-per-view, along with an end-to-end flow of subscription lifecycle management. At various points, all modules (catalogue management, content management, product display, shop cart, payment gateway, self-serve, promotion management, etc.) have synchronized integration with THINK which allows users to seamlessly experience the complete lifecycle.

What are the aspects of Subscription and Fulfilment management that would benefit from innovation?

THINK aims to be a one-stop solution for publishers. The THINK suite allows publishers to manage one single platform for delivery, rather having multiple systems to manage your back-end invoice & order flow, payment system, accounting system, access management, content delivery, catalogue management, etc. Publishing has becomes complex over time, and innovation is the key to keep it simple and easily accessible.

THINK offers more sophisticated and numerous subscription models along with a wider range of fulfilment capabilities. More and more customers are becoming subscribers because subscription experiences built around services meet consumers’ needs better than the static offerings or a single product. But in a lot of cases purchasing a subscription will still involve fulfilling content or products whether that is physical or digital, and that’s where THINK offers more than just recurring billing.

What are the needs and challenges?

For many clients the key challenge is to provide an application that allows for more than just recurring billing, but to couple this capability with fulfilment, whether physical or digital.

THINK addresses many of the acknowledged needs and challenges inherent in fulfillment of scholarly publications, including:

• Single view of complete order history, regardless of sales channel
• Management of complex order configuration and pricing
• Ability to handle many orders quickly, with access from anywhere
• Support for multiple currencies and languages
• Data security

How will the acquisition of Think Subscription allow you to innovate better in the future in terms of providing end-to -end solutions for your customers?

We communicate with our customers closely in order to understand their goals and challenges. As an organization, MPS has the capability to provide services across the complete author-to-reader value chain, including typesetting services, production services, work-flow management, peer review services, customization & development services, order management and much more. We consistently introduce new technology and update our solutions as necessary to ensure we are adapting to clients' changing needs and market dynamics. Our goal is to help our clients achieving their business objectives.

Position in the publishing value chain - An opportunity to manage and support our customer’s customers.
Advancement of platform business vision - As publishers are investing in their platforms for a competitive edge, we are consistently investing in our platforms.
Rich understanding of the THINK Platform - Users of the platform as a service bureau, system integrators in implementations, and developed various tools above the platform for greater efficiency and extension to other business systems.
Synergies with MPS Platforms - ScholarStor and MPSInsight neatly integrate with THINK, making it together a platform suite fulfilling end-to-end requirements of the publishers.
Complementary client base - We have very limited overlap in customers. MPS is a customer focused organization and we develop deep strategic relationships with our customers.

Do you have any future plans to expand to extend your product/service offering further?

THINK is now part of a growing company. More importantly, publishing is our core; and science and scholarly publishers account for the largest share of our business. We have a platform-based growth vision and the THINK platform will be a core aspect of our growth strategy. Our aspiration will be to offer a platform suite that helps solve your business problems. MPS has a strong track record of building High Performance teams. Our team culture demands great flexibility and high responsiveness to our customers' business needs and technical requirements. We are a competitive organization that is always looking to learn in order to be more meaningful. We have a list of items in our current product enhancement road-map and with every passing day we are approaching towards a new milestone to be achieved in the publishing platform domain. We are actively engaged in introducing new functionality and features.

Rahul Arora

Author biography

Rahul Arora is the Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited. He graduated from Babson College, Massachusetts and has a MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Rahul led the transformation of his family’s print-focused publishing business to a larger, professionally-driven B2B media enterprise. He has led and grown some of Gallup’s most innovative consulting partnerships in the APAC region. As CEO of MPS, he manages the current operations in India and the United States, while continuing to actively engage with their client base.

About MPS Limited and THINK

MPS Limited provides platforms and services for content creation, full-service production, and distribution. The business division, THINK provides leading order management solutions that help you optimize subscription lifecycle events, maximize billing, and increase return on investment.

Web: www.adi-mps.com
Web: www.mps-think.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mpsltd
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mps-limited

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.  

Fast Track Content from Author to Reader: Collaborative workflow management systems that work

Rahul Arora, Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited, draws on many years’ experience, including the development of MPSTrak, a core component of their flagship cloud-based Digital Publishing Platform – DigiCore – that streamlines, automates, and optimizes the publishing process.

In this guest post he considers the need to implement a collaborative workflow management system to manage the complete author-to-reader value chain, and the associated benefits for publishers.

"A publishing workflow is a sequence of activities performed by individuals or groups to make the content available to the reader. Participation is required from the author, editorial team, reviewers, and production staff; with the publisher managing and owning the complete process in near real time.

In the past seven to eight years, much has changed in publishing workflow management. New technology, publishing models, workflows, demand from authors, and growing competition have created a demand for increased automation, efficiency, standardization, faster publishing, global visibility, and cost savings.

Publishers need a flexible and adaptable publishing workflow management system that deals with any existing multiplicity in publishing processes without creating any echo, supports future business workflow requirements, provides global visibility, and allows the business to make any required changes with no or minimum dependency on the technology team.

We have seen publishers struggling with various challenges in their workflows: repetitive data entry in different systems, inadequate data validation, no control on processes, challenges in managing user notifications and reminders, tracking work from author and providing visibility on work status, article-based or custom publishing, issue make-up, schedule management, managing payments, and integrating different internal and external components.

In some cases, publishers had over 30 production workflows, with more than 80% repetition in data entry. The resultant issues and productivity inhibitors with apparently simple looking processes would see staff doing something in a far more complex way than was necessary.

When we start to work with clients, we always carry out a “workflow discovery” workshop at the start of each system implementation. Invariably we find that many times staff don’t have a strong rationale behind following the existing process steps. The response to most of questions turns out to be “Someone asked us to do this way and we never thought too deeply about it”. In addition, there are always loose boundaries between editorial and production work and different teams doing the same things in different ways.

We recommend publishers adopt an automated workflow system through a capable and experienced partner without waiting for the struggle to peak and creating barriers in growth.

Because one thing remains true: successful organizations, the ones that ‘disrupt’ the old guard, are the ones that have figured out an end-to-end creative process that enables them to beat their competition.

The major things to consider are the platform’s flexibility to incorporate changes and a knowledgeable team that can lead and drive change. We advise clients to expect:

• Intuitive user interface with global visibility across the publishing process 
• Faster time to market 
• Increased transparency between publishing process stakeholders 
• Support for flexible business models 
• Increase in staff work handling capacity.

We were delighted to hear from one of our customers who reported absorption of three year growth in production volume without adding any production staff when they implemented MPSTrak. Another reported a 46% increase in article-handling capacity of a production editor. Whichever system you work with, make sure it helps you deliver the capacity, flexibility and adaptability to deal with an increasingly complex publishing workflow."

Rahul Arora is the Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited. He graduated from Babson College, Massachusetts and has a MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Rahul led the transformation of his family’s print-focused publishing business to a larger, professionally-driven B2B media enterprise. He has led and grown some of Gallup’s most innovative consulting partnerships in the APAC region. As CEO of MPS, he manages the current operations in India and the United States, while continuing to actively engage with their client base.

MPS Limited has provided platforms and services for content creation, full-service production, and distribution for over 46 years. The business division, MPS Technologies, is a leading partner for global publishers and caters to the rapidly changing technological requirements of the publishing workflow. MPSTrak is a core component of their flagship cloud-based Digital Publishing Platform – DigiCore – that streamlines, automates, and optimizes the publishing process.

MPS Limited are sponsoring the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference 14-16 September. Book now and follow #alpsp16 #alpspawards for details.