We had more than a hundred remote sales reps across seven states, feeding seven magazines that together ran 2,400 to 2,600 pages a week with a circulation of 640,000. Every magazine had its own deadline, so there was a deadline every day of the week.

The night before deadline, every rep stuffed the week’s work into a UPS overnight envelope. Paperwork, and in the early days, film canisters. The envelopes landed in Milford around 10 am, and a crew started opening and sorting. Stapling paperwork, developing film, mounting negatives on card stock to be numbered, labeled, and matched to digital files. Only when all of that was done could we start building pages.

The biggest magazine deadlined Friday at 4 pm, which meant the bulk of its material arrived Saturday morning. So we worked every Saturday. Four or five people, six-plus hours, every week, on overtime. And some Saturdays UPS simply failed to deliver. Everyone came in, waited, got sent home, and came back Sunday.

After a few of those Sundays I started asking the obvious question. Why is any of this on a truck?

The photos went first. We moved every rep to a digital camera, made sure each one had a computer and a card reader, and I stood up an FTP site just for images. I wrote scripts so the rep’s whole job was clicking one button. The software talked to the FTP server programmatically, built the folder structure, and the images flowed in. The scanning department kept the cropping and color work, but nobody was processing film anymore. Our darkroom slowly became, well, dark.

The paperwork went second. Xerox made a small duplex document scanner that cost about $300, so every rep got one. Same button. It built the rep’s folder structure on our server, opened the scanning software, and ran everything in the feeder, both sides.

That was the whole workflow. The rep hit one button on deadline night and was done. The material was in our building that same night, so second and third shift processed it immediately instead of a Saturday crew waiting on a truck.

The overnight UPS charges alone were about $100,000 a year, and they went to zero. The Saturday overtime went with them. And the schedule gained something money doesn’t show, breathing room between the sales deadline and the press deadline, which in the era of five-file EPS pages was worth almost as much as the savings.