A large publishing company based in Germany.

A company which runs a business of publishing voucher books decided to facilitate the work of its Back Office workers by automating the information gathering process. A voucher book, or a Gutscheinbuch, is a brochure in which restaurant and leisure facilities present themselves and offer a voucher to the buyer of the book so that they visit the location and bring in the voucher (e.g., for an extra free meal, etc.). All information needed for the actual printing of the book was gathered and put together by the back office team manually, which was a complicated and time consuming process, so the company needed a software application to perform these functions.

We designed a comprehensive application which synchronizes and coordinates the work of people involved in creating voucher books. There are three main types of users involved in the workflow of the system:

1. Back Office team;

2. Partner Salesmen;

3. Editors.

The Back Office users enter new voucher book templates into the system, add new Partners, assign restaurants to them, prepare all the necessary information, and monitor the whole system. After the basic information is entered, the application allows the Back Office users to start creating books. New books further become available to Partner Salesman users who can add new pages, images, and text information to them.

As soon as the Partner Salesman user has entered his information, a notification email is sent to the Editor, who logs into the system, opens newly created pages, reviews text and images, updates them, and changes the page status to "reviewed." The system then generates a galley proof PDF and sends it by email to the partner for clearance. Partner reviews the galley proof and accepts the clearance of the page.

The system architecture includes a My SQL database for relational data and a PDF files generator. The Data Access Layer is represented by the Java object / relationship mapping framework that manages all database-specific logic. The Creator Server Access layer consists of Java classes responsible for putting data together and communicating with the Creator Server. All business logic of the system is realized by Java classes. The user authentication and authorization classes provide complete system security.

Java, Caucho Resin 3.0.12

Eclipse Platform 3.1.0

My SQL Database 4.1.x

The implemented system has significantly facilitated and speeded up the process of creating voucher books. By automating a number of functions which were earlier performed solely by the Back Office staff, it made the whole procedure less time-consuming and more cost-effective.

Thanks to the application, the company can take more orders from restaurants and increase its profits.