Case Studies Corporate Publishing

Vattenfall Europe AG

Vattenfall is the fifth largest power producer and the largest heat energy producer in Europe. The company is currently doing business in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland and Sweden and Great Britain. Vattenfall is actively participating in the whole electricity value chain (production, transmission, distribution and marketing). Furthermore Vattenfall is playing an active role in the marketing of electricity and produces, distributes and sells heat. The Swedish State is the sole owner of the mother company, Vattenfall AB.

Vattenfall Europe is one of the leading European power companies and consolidates the production and conversion into electricity of affordable local brown coal, power generation from waterpower and nuclear energy as well as the transport and trade of energy. Vattenfall Europe provides for a round the clock provision with electricity and heat in the megacities Berlin and Hamburg.
The company magazine terravatt is the main medium of communication of Vattenfall with its 20,000 German employees. terravatt is published ten times a year with a number of 50,000 copies, each magazine having 68 pages. The editorial team is working in offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Cottbus and Leipzig, an external agency is responsible for layout and production.

The Task
Due to the decentralized method of operation of the editorial team at three company sites and the involvement of an external agency, the data-based production was always connected with a high need for coordination and a very complicated handling of the respective files. Furthermore the main editorial office in Berlin had no computerized / EDP-driven overview of the production status.
The employment of a production database should facilitate a status-driven production control, parallel working on texts and layout, and the central administration of the produced documents inclusive versioning and it should as well enable central production tracking by the main editorial office.
Additionally, the system should be operated outside of the Vattenfall network in order to be able to quickly integrate external assistants/ staff and service providers. In order to meet the high Vattenfall Europe security standards, the integration of the corporate staff had to be made via a VPN-network.

The Project
Since January 2008 SoftCare K2 is employed for production optimization. The system is operated by SNAP Innovation and is hosted highly-availabe at mcs GmbH (www.mcs.de). Access for Vattenfall employees is made via VPN. The creative agency is also working on the system via a secured access.
The system had been installed and taken into operation in December 2007. The change-over was carried out in January 2008 in parallel with the production of the February issue of terravatt. The time frame for the migration was a little more than two weeks. The employees of the Berlin, Hamburg and Cottbus offices were trained centrally. Production support was carried out on site resp. by telephone.

Number of Working Stations: 15
Operational System Server: Linux
Operational System Client: Windows
Data Base: PrimeBase

Used components:
- SoftCare K2

Services:
- Comprehensive analysis of the processes and requirements
- Support for the definition of workflows
- Installation and customizing
- Training
- Production support
- Support
- Project management
- Operation of the system
- Hosting and Housing of Server Components


Customer Feedback:
„We are using SoftCare K2 for half a year now. The system is working absolutely properly/ stably. I can say that the expected effects have become fully true. I am very satisfied.”

Siegfried Wagner, Editor in Chief, terravatt