A pilot implementation of WoodWing's Elvis DAM digital asset management solution at Ringier Axel Springer Media’s site in Serbia yielded time savings of ten hours search time a week for each employee.

The newspapers, magazines and digital media joint venture – established in 2010 with 3100 staff in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Serbia – was researching a group-wide solution.

In Serbia, 550 journalists are supported by a photo department of ten managing an ever-growing archive of currently eight million items. The aim is to establish a central multimedia archive which can be searched by all editors – online and print – and be the base for more automation in image handling.

Ringier Axel Springer chief information officer Marcus Dauck says the initial setup took just three days, and implementation – including training of photo – was completed in three months.

The Elvis DAM is fully integrated with WoodWing´s multi-channel publishing system Enterprise, with users “very positive” about the user interface and ease of use, and metadata and taxonomy-based search reducing search time by approximately ten hours a week per employee.

The project has also reduced storage space because of minimising redundancy of images, and brought other benefits such as the elimination of lawsuits resulting from accidental copyright infringement.

“It has been the key to success in an extremely complicated process of storing and retrieving digital content, which greatly facilitates the daily operations of our editorial board,” says IT project manager Marko Josifovic.

Pictured: The Serbian newsroom of Ringier Axel Springer, which produces three main daily newspapers plus magazines