Customer Testimonials

Christie's International PLC

For auction house Christie's International PLC, MassTransit has fundamentally changed one of its most critical business processes: producing the more than 600 high-end catalogs that advertise its sales and educate customers.

When Christie's needed to deliver or receive the high-resolution images that fill the auction house's famous catalogs, staff members could use email for small files but often resorted to burning CDs and DVDs of larger files and sending them by courier or mail. But going postal really was not viable for a business that processes 350,000 digital files annually, said Neil McCutcheon, head of catalog production for Christie's London office.

Now photographers from all over the globe use MassTransit to upload photos into Christie's workflow system and add metadata tags to identify images. The catalog production line -- from the prepress vendors to proofers and printers -- uses the metadata information to locate and deliver files quickly to meet tight deadlines.

The Results

Christie's has seen a "significant savings" in all areas of production, said Neil McCutcheon. In addition to the money saved through greater efficiency, the automation has opened up the option for the first time of producing parts of the catalogs in the low-cost economies of India and Sri Lanka.

Fort Dearborn Company Increases Customer Satisfaction with MassTransit

Fort Dearborn Company, the nation's leading manufacturer of high-impact label solutions for high-velocity consumer goods marketers, manages between sixty and eighty thousand active consumer product labels at any given time.

Effectively managing these files is critical to meeting demanding production schedules and reducing time to market. "In our industry, the logistics side is getting more and more challenging," says Murray Oles, Vice President and Chief Technology Architect for Fort Dearborn. "Labels are getting moved to different locations around the country based on where products are being packed, creating a just-in-time manufacturing scenario. This tendency to regionalize means more versions of files."

With more versions of files, Fort Dearborn needed greater organization and more efficient file management to better meet customer needs. Kirk Frankovich, system administrator, described how Fort Dearborn utilizes MassTransit to manage two critical and strategic business processes: "One server sits in our DMZ out on the Internet and serves as the central resource for collecting and distributing files with our partners and customers. The second server sits inside our firewall and is tied into our internal workflow. Through this unique set-up we can manage and automate our workflow processes, while also adding security and redundancy to ensure minimal downtime and consistency in our delivery of service."

"There are several key benefits to using MassTransit as an integral part of this system. Number one is speed. Number two is accountability. It provides a clear audit trail so that you know where files are in the process and can proactively monitor their progress." - Murray Oles, Vice President and Chief Technology Architect

Customer Satisfaction

Fort Dearborn customer Schawk, Inc. has noted marked improvement in their overall user experience with Fort Dearborn since the introduction of MassTransit. "MassTransit is highly reliable, and that's been great," explains Andy Squier, Business Manager for Schawk. "In our business, it is inevitable that rush jobs occur. Now that Fort Dearbon uses MassTransit, we are confident that that we won't lose hours, half a day or even a full day dealing with system issues to get the job done and meet our customer's deadlines."

"MassTransit plays an integral role in our system and has made our life a thousand times easier." - Kirk Frankovich, System Administrator

International Greetings Adopts MassTransit for Global Delivery of Digital Creative Files

International Greetings PLC, the leading designer and manufacturer of private label greetings products and film and television character-based licensed stationery is using MassTransit Enterprise throughout its operations. The firm employs MassTransit for sharing design work among internal studios in the United States and United Kingdom and to electronically deliver high-volumes of production files to printers around the world.

Each week, the $450 million corporation relies on MassTransit to transfer an average of 30 GB to 50 GB of digital data to global suppliers for its gift wrap, greeting cards, gift products and accessory files. Unlike the time-intensive and unreliable File Transfer Protocol (FTP) file transfer utilities, MassTransit provides the speed and reliability that International Greetings needs to ensure tight production deadlines are met.

"International Greetings uses MassTransit in the United Kingdom, the USA and China," said Mike Harris, Group IT Manager of International Greetings. "MassTransit delivers vastly improved turnaround times that provide us with a key advantage, especially for holiday and seasonal merchandise, which is a significant portion of our business. Before MassTransit, we delivered files on CDs and DVDs, which took considerable staff time for the manual mailing process and added three to four extra days to our production schedule. We tried FTP, but it failed miserably. With MassTransit, we can rest assured our creative and production files are where they need to be when they need to be there."

Key to assuring International Greetings personnel that their file transfers are in line with business needs is the visibility into the global file transfer process afforded by MassTransit. Through the product's Dashboard portal, users can easily monitor and manage their enterprise network of MassTransit servers. The Dashboard gives users easy, Web-based access to delivery status information including logs, real-time progress indicators and queue-status. This allows users both inside and outside the organization to quickly find detailed information regarding file transfers so they can ensure business objectives are achieved by their geographically distributed file transfer workflows.