Founded in 1965, ACE is the second-largest automobile club in Germany with over 650,000 members.

ACE is making its digital transformation with the help of Comwrap Reply an expert integrator in Adobe and J2S solutions.

In this context, ACE chose to implement Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to remove organizational silos. AEM DAM centralizes assets to make them available to internal content producers; AEM Site is the CMS that allows content to be produced and distributed independently of the communication media concerned.

Lenkrad magazine production

ACE publishes a magazine with a circulation of 920,000 copies to inform readers about cars, mobility, leisure and travel.

To speed up the production of its magazine, ACE was convinced by the ease of use of Simple Workspace. Content is created in AEM in a media-agnostic way. Articles and assets are then linked to an issue of the magazine and automatically retrieved by Simple Workspace’s AEM connector.

Around 15 users collaborate to create the magazine’s publication flatplan with Simple Workspace.

An iterative approach

The modules

When the project was launched with a strong time constraint (3 months to produce the first issue), the graphic design of the magazine was still in progress. Only the need for strong creativity was specified! To respect the deadline, we started by creating “freestyle” modules that allow the “components” of an article to be positioned individually on the pages, such as the title, the headline, an image, highlights, etc.

With these elements in place, user training was able to begin fairly early on in the project, and this training enabled a number of adjustments to be made, particularly to the workflow.

As the graphic design of the sections was validated, more complete “modules” were put in place. This made it possible to automate the layout of recurring types of articles from one issue to the next, such as the editorial, the “pros and cons”, etc., with a single click.

Planning issue

Planning issue
To produce the magazine on time, the following steps were defined:

• Validation of articles in AEM,
• Placement of the articles in the flatplan by the editors,
• Page fine-tuning by the graphics studio,
• Proofreading by the chief editor,
• Sending to the printer.

For the next issues, we worked on booking advertising space and planning content.
To produce a magazine, the editorial team meets to decide on the subjects to be covered and to define their characteristics. At this stage, the content does not yet exist in AEM.
The flexibility of the Simple Workspace data model, which can handle different data sources, has helped us. The editorial team can create “topics” records, associate them with a topic, define the theme and the number of allocated pages.
This method is used to manage all the advertising formats offered by ACE.

Like the articles from AEM, these records are then placed in the flatplan to book the spaces.

By combining the “topics” and “advertisements” records, the editorial staff and the advertising department can view and share information on the progress of the content and advertisement planning.
We invite you to discover the result on the publisher’s website: the PDF of the publication is here.
If you wish to find out more on how to connect your CMS to our flatplan and accelerate the production of your publications, contact us!

Richard Loubéjac
Cofounder of J2S