2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	Publishing Management Software Managing Editor, Inc. Jenkintown, PA USA Year: 1999 Status: Laureate Category: Business & Related Services Nominating Company: Adobe Systems, Inc.
	Sophisticated rule-based placement algorithms and look-ahead assures that all constrains are met as individual ads are placed on individual pages of a periodical, rolling back deadlines and enhancing responsiveness to advertisers.
	The company's layout planning software is used by commercial publishers worldwide to plan the placement of advertising within their publications. Because the ratio of advertising to editorial content in a publication determines its size, this planning process -- called pagination -- is absolutely critical to determining the compactness of a paper, and therefore the amount of newsprint used to produce a full publication press run. At the same time, complex rules govern the placement of advertising within a publication: certain advertisers cannot appear near each other; others require specific placement in special portions of the paper; still others must be placed using specific distribution schemes. Violation of these rules by a publisher can not only result in loss of revenue -- called "make goods" - but of customer good will. Finally, publishing is an intensely deadline driven process. Publishers constantly strive to decrease the amount of time between the "close" for advertising billing for an issue and actual production of a publication. This roll back of deadlines increases the timeliness of advertising copy and maximizes the window of opportunity for selling advertising space. MEI's publishing management software solves each of these problems for the publisher, resulting in decreased expense and increased revenue. At the same time, the substitution of computer technology for what, up until several years ago, was a matter of drawing on paper using pencil and eraser, has decreased by an order of magnitude the planning process and, in many instances, has allowed publishers to decrease staffing for that process. To achieve these results, our desktop software uses advanced rules resolution and look ahead features, a philosophy of open integration into traditional environments that are still using legacy systems, and the ability to directly output ad contents to backend desktop publishing programs. These technologies have been pioneered by Managing Editor and have made its software a reference standard for the publishing industry
	MEI's layout systems software has directly benefited commercial publishers, allowing them to dramatically reduce publication planning time, shorten deadlines, resolve advertiser conflicts, decrease staffing, and tighten expense and revenue planning. Users have been freed from the constraints of manual publication planning, and in its automation have been freed to think more strategically about planning by gaining the time to perform additional tasks. Equally important, the company's development of a sophisticated, rules-based "placement engine" will lead to other applications of the technology in disparate fields.
	Critical to MEI's layout systems has been the evolution of its geometric distribution technology, called the "placement engine", which uses complex rules resolution to generate decisions for placing geometries in a publication space. The engine, however, can be thought of in long view as a mechanism for taking multiple, discrete inputs, applying to those inputs a matrix of rules, and generating as a result a decision matrix. In this light, it will ultimately be valuable to other endeavors, from the prosaic, such as planning the distribution of vegetables in a vegetable garden, to the sophisticated, such as generating buy or sell decisions in a volatile stock market.
	MEI's layout systems arose of the specific need to automate an entirely manual, and time-consuming, process: the layout of advertising within a publication. The company saw this as an opportunity not only to automate the planning process, but to move publishers to a thoroughly digital delivery system from order entry to output of pages. Our layout systems software provide "open" interfaces to front end order entry systems and "plug ins" to desktop publishing programs that allow direct design and output of fully-produced pages. The deficiency of paper and pencil page planning in the digital delivery chain was not plugged until the introduction of the company's layout software. The company's placement engine is a first of its kind; and MEI's layout system products -- the first developed for desktop systems -- are considered best of class by the industry.
	While serving a niche market, the company's layout systems are arrayed worldwide across a spectrum of users, from the small, such as the Yukon News, to the largest, such as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. This broad market acceptance is as much a testament to the manner in which our layout systems have generalized the solution of seemingly market-specific problems as it is to the fact that the software is continually evolving in response to customer need. As previously noted, too, the software's underlying technology will be generalized for other endeavors, helping complex decisions to be made more rapidly according to user-defined rules.
	The greatest initial difficulties, as in all start-up ventures, came in securing financing to develop the company's products. Acquiring that seed capital was made even more difficult because of the company's desire to serve a vertical market and the first year's of the endeavor were marked by negative cash flow. That was 10 years ago. In the intervening years, the greatest technical difficulties have come in achieving acceptable levels of performance for the company's placement engine. Some of these difficulties have been overcome by successive generations of faster processors, but many have come from difficult and hard-labored optimizations of the underlying technology.