Q. What kind of business are you using Questetra for?
Impress R&D is in charge of R&D (Research & Development) within Impress Group to support digitization of business document and rationalization. The Impress Group is a media enterprise group that develops businesses and publishes on the themes such as, “IT Leaders” by the theme of IT, “Rittor Music” by music, “MdN” by designing, “Yama To Keikoku” by mountaineering and nature.
We use Questetra as the process management system for the e-book publishing business named “NextPublishing”, from a planning of a book to its delivery.
Q. Please tell us how you utilize it concretely.
In the publication of e-books, we create electronic files such as EPUB / PDF eventually. Since there is no cost burden associated with printing and bookbinding, even an individual is possible to sell e-books easily at bookstores where handle those such as Amazon.com.
As an overview of the Workflow, it can be divided into 5 stages. That is, to prepare planning document, to create of product specifications (layouts, font size, typeface, figure insertion, etc.), to make cover and colophon, to generate the electronic file, and to deliver. We have built all these processes of e-book publication with services such as Questetra and G Suite. It can be said that we built a virtual publisher and a virtual printing factory in the cloud. I think it was an effect unique to Questetra, which is, we were able to use it with a small start in accordance with the starting up of “NextPublishing”, and also to brush up the business operation by trial and error.
By the way, inside the company, we call Questetra as “SiORi”.
Q. We have heard that you have used from the stage of organizing your business requirements.
As “NextPublishing” was a new business, so we first arranged our business requirements. In doing so, we created a Workflow diagram that shows the flow of the entire work using Questetra. This diagram was created for the purpose to organize the flow of the entire work, so we did not run as Questetra App as it is. Based on the diagram, I divide the business and respectively created Questetra Apps which actually run.
I suppose that Questetra was easy to use also in creating flow diagrams for organizing a business.
Q. Please tell us about how you utilize in operation monitoring.
We are using Questetra’s monitoring function to realize the stable operation of “NextPublishing”. That is, we have realized automation of various processing throughout the process such as an e-book PDF file is automatically generated when document data is input. We use the “Heatmap” feature to monitor whether they are not stopping in unintended places. We detect occurrences of timeouts in calling external processing (G Suite) from Questetra based on the graph of the Heatmap, and then we recover manually.
For the future, we expect Questetra to enhance its functions so that we can construct a mechanism that is capable of automating recovery.
