Production Manager - an Overview

Production Manager is the module that provides you with the workflow and tracking tools that enable you to manage the creation of new products, effectively allowing you to break the process down into stages and tasks that can then be attributed to people and organisations. In addition, you can report on all of this, providing much useful information that will enable you to manage the business more effectively. 

Production Manager is very flexible; the functionality is determined by you, based on the items within schedules that you create. The configuration of the system is established by you to meet the requirements and work flows of your business. Adjustments can be made throughout the production schedule and notes can be added to remind you of past decisions. This allows you to improve on your production processes in the future. You can also establish a sophisticated level of permissions in order to ensure accuracy throughout your system.

There are mandatory fields within the system, which enable you to get the best use and functionality from the system. All mandatory fields are marked with a red *.

There are several elements within Production Manager, as shown in the following screen grab of the main menu. Please bear in mind that some of the sections of Production Manager are immediately linked with Title Manager. Please read below for basic definitions of what each portion of the system does, and how it may or may not be linked to other parts of your system.

Book Production: This part of the system is where all products that are now in the production process are tracked. Title information can feed through to this part of the system either through Title Management or Editorial. The screen shot below shows you how this part of the system looks. It is displayed very similarly to Title Management.  Clicking on a particular title name will take you to a set of tabs of information relevant to creating a schedule. We will take the tabs in turn a bit later, as much of the information that appears in them is populated from different areas of Production Manager.

Prod. Scheduling: This is a part of the system that is automatically populated by the information you added/manipulated in Book Production. Here is at-a -glance information, essentially the production schedule with its various elements laid out on a grid. This allows you to quickly spot check the items within your schedules. All of your titles appear in this screen, and are displayed in order of publication date. Once you tick that the title is being moved into production, and you give it a schedule, the item will appear on the screen like the following. For more information regarding how to manipulate this screen, please click here.

Cover Checklist: This is a quick review of where titles have got to, similar to a paper-based checklist, just in electronic form.

Reports: The reports section is where you will find multiple different reports, allowing you to review: Production Schedules, Editorial Schedules, Print Orders and many more. For more information, please click here.

Production Admin: This is the area you need to review to configure all areas of production and editorial workflows and systems. For more information about configuring the system, please go to: Production Manager.