Case Study

Developer/Location:

Andy McCallihan, Circulation Director

The Morning Journal

Overview:

The single copy circulation team at the the Morning Journal, a daily newspaper serving Lorain, Erie, Huron and Western Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, uses Pendragon Forms to conduct market tours of their retail store and rack sales locations.  Field information is used to generate daily reports for the publisher and circulation manager that help focus distributor sales efforts and improve product sales.

Sixteen single copy distribution team members and managers have been equipped with Palm handhelds and Pendragon Forms applications.  Since newspaper sales data is tracked by distributor, the daily market tour begins by selecting a distributor from the parent-form.  A location look-up sub-form is then used to select the stores and racks that will be included the market tour that day.  At each location, information about the weather conditions, paper draw, actual papers in stock, rack card, and the rack or store fixture condition are entered into another form on the handheld.  At the end of each day, the handhelds are synchronized at the office, and reports are generated directly from the Access data tables.

"NONE of what we wanted to do would have been possible if not for Pendragon Forms,"  says Circulation Director Andy McCallihan. "We researched Access and other software applications, but they fell so far short of the mark that it was not worth wasting our time.  All that has changed!" 

Pleased with the results from the single copy circulation team, the newspaper is looking for other ways to improve their operations with Palm handhelds and Pendragon Forms including applications for carrier managers, the transportation department, the ad department and the sales team.

Before Pendragon Forms:

Before using Palm handhelds and Pendragon Forms, the circulation team would spend several hours each day rewriting the market tour.  They had no way of tracking findings by location, aside from reviewing the paper forms.

Development Time:

Designing the requirements and getting feedback required about 30 hours of time, and actually creating the forms took about two hours.

Benefits:

The Morning Journal can now track distributor performance, and use the information to help them improve sales efforts and maximize single copy paper revenue. Sellouts have improved by 15% which translates into more sales and revenue. "To us here are the Morning Journal, Pendragon Forms has been invaluable and continues to improve its ROI with every new application."