The UK’s Guardian News & Media has signed advertising business management company Operative to provide a platform to consolidate and run its digital and print media businesses.

The move is part of reorganisation to make GNM a ‘digital-first’ organisation with open journalism on the web at the heart of its strategy.

Technology director Andy Beale says their digital systems were often disconnected from main order-to-fulfillment workflows in the legacy systems built originally for print only, and this led to expensive manual processing overheads.

While GNM had considered building a system internally, the new platform had functionality and capabilities built in, “enabling us to consolidate our print and digital business units, streamline our order to fulfillment process, and equip our sales organisation with more innovative, cross-channel products.”

The product will integrate with Salesforce.com, bringing together critical business systems and processes to enable the publisher to transform the way it does business. Print and digital media businesses, including guardian.co.uk, as well as the ‘Guardian’ and ‘Observer’ newspapers, will all be running from the same platform in the first half of 2012.

A holistic view of their media business – from available inventory and campaign data to client invoicing and billing – will enable them to deliver more innovative, cross-channel products to the market, and to scale quicker in order to support future growth and expansion.  

Operative – which numbers the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and MSN among its global customers – recently appointed Dean Jenkins as general manager of its Australian office.  Clients there include Cricket Australia and REA Media.