McCann developed the PDF form a few years ago to replace small handwritten slips of paper bearing guideline information for each mechanical. The PDF form included quick reference to details such as checkboxes for new mechanicals versus pickup mechanicals, and file locations.

Solution
To link the PDF form to an asset management system, McCann Erickson New York is implementing Xinet WebNative Venture, a digital asset management database, with Triple Triangle’s Mechanical Cubed, which will provide a single integrated workflow for creating and maintaining mechanicals, and the metadata associated with them.

The combination of Xinet and Triple Triangle eliminates the tedious task of entering metadata by extracting it automatically from a PDF form. That same metadata is then used to create a mechanical, complete with crop marks and slugs, and is automatically pulled into WebNative Venture in English word descriptions as searching criteria by agency, clients and studio personnel.

Result
Under the new workflow, which is in the process of being fine-tuned and deployed, Project Management will fill out the PDF form with mechanical specifications and email it the Studio, where it will automatically populate all the fields that the studio artists previously retyped when creating mechanicals. When the mechanical file is saved to the server, it auto-populates those same matching fields in the WebNative Venture database.

“This is obviously a huge time-saver. When the project manager gives us correct information, it remains correct three steps later and no one will have to retype it, or make sure they typed it correctly,” said Stefani Pagano, Vice President, and Manager of Digital Services of McCann New York. “With the new system, we will gain access to information on the web about our mechanicals that we had no realistic way of obtaining otherwise.

“Triple Triangle is a bridge that will tie Xinet and InDesign into our workflow in a complete way. Together they will provide more accuracy and reliability when creating mechanicals, and we won’t have to spend extra time typing the same information into our WebNative Venture database,” said Pagano.