Current Newspaper and Magazine production depend upon a set of heterogeneous systems with a loose link between them.

This leads to a “sequential” planning with the Advertising system delivering a layout to several  Editorial Systems which, in turn, deliver a plan to the pre-press system and then in some cases, deliver a plan to the press control system.

All these activities are one-way with little chance of modifying the structure of the newspaper in the middle of the preparation process (i.e. in the pre-press department), and automatically communicating to the editorial/advertising systems the changes that may occur.

Managing production is therefore a matter of organizing the sequence of activities and of setting rules for communicating back and forth the changes required (or planned) in the various departments.

Tracking, in most cases, is limited to each of the subprocess systems (editorial, advertising systems) where each production system is focused on tracking only its own activities. More difficult is to extend an integrated data collection to the all process.

Besides obvious advantages, an integrated data collection will also help to achieve forecasts and statistics regarding production consumables. E3P is not expected to substitute each publishing subprocess. On the contrary, it wants to become the glue among these subprocesses.