*The name of G Suite was changed to Google Workspace in October 2020
Q. What kind of business are you using Questetra for?
The Impress Group is a media company group that develops its business around the main themes of IT, music, design, mountains and nature, and publishes IT Leaders, Rittor Music, MdN, Yama to Keikoku and others.
We use Questetra as the process management system for the e-book publishing business named “NextPublishing”, from the planning of a book to its delivery.
Q. Please tell us how you utilize it specifically
In the publication of e-books we create electronic files such as EPUB / PDF. Since there is no cost burden associated with printing and bookbinding, even an individual is able to sell e-books easily at bookstores such as Amazon.com that sell e-books.
As an overview, the Workflow can be divided into 5 stages: proposal writing, product specification writing (layout, font size and typeface, insertion of figures, etc.), cover and colophon creation, electronic file generation, and delivery. We have built the entire processes of e-book publication using services such as Questetra and G Suite. It can be said that we have built a virtual publisher and a virtual printing factory in the cloud. I think it was thanks to Questetra that we were able to start small with the launch of NextPublishing, and then refine the business operation by trial and error.
By the way, inside the company we call Questetra “SiORi”.
Q. We heard that you have used it from the stage of organizing your business requirements.
As NextPublishing was a new business, we first arranged our business requirements. In doing so we created a Workflow diagram that shows the flow of the entire business using Questetra. This diagram was created for the purpose of organizing the entire flow of work, so we did not run this Questetra App as it was. Based on that diagram, I divided the business and created respective Questetra Apps which actually run.
I think that Questetra was easy to use for creating flow diagrams and organizing a business.
Q. Please tell us about how you utilize it in operation monitoring
We are using Questetra’s monitoring function to realize the stable operation of NextPublishing. That is, we have achieved the automation of various operations throughout the process, such as the automatic generation of an e-book PDF file when document data is input. We use the Heatmap feature to monitor whether they are stopping in unintended places. We can detect occurrences of timeouts when calling external processors (such as G Suite) from Questetra based on the Heatmap graph, and then we do a manual recovery.
In the future, we expect Questetra to enhance its functions so that we can construct a mechanism that is capable of automating the recovery process itself.
