The Department of Trade & Industry produces a range of technical and general business publications, which are used by advisers and small businesses.CNR was commissioned to help integrate material from a number of different Department of Trade & Industry programmes into the Achieving best practice in your business service. CNR catalogued and evaluated the existing publications to determine their suitability for the new service. The main challenges were the large number of items involved, the diversity of the material, the multiple formats used (hard copies, CD's, DVDs, Video, Pdfs, HTML) and the number of decision makers.
We used this process to map the existing knowledge base and match content to requirements. From this we were able to rationalise the existing stock of material significantly and identify gaps in content to be filled from other sources.
Following a cost benefit analysis, this model was used to support decision making on the residual stock. CNR introduced a stock management process and has, wherever possible, translated content into digital format. Surplus material has been archived and the business case was established to transfer suitable categories to Print on Demand, in preference to using conventional printing methods. Finally, where the copyright ownership was ambiguous, CNR secured the legal authorisation to use the material.
