OUR TRAINING SURVEY

With the current obsession with digital things it's easy to forget that the supply chain for books is still delivering the vast majority of sales revenues, much of it dependent on BIC standards or standards promoted by BIC. So it's been timely to be reminded that it is also dependent on the knowledge and experience of individual IT specialists in their own companies. The suggestion that BIC should play a part in training newcomers to the industry in the dark arts of EDI, IRI and the rest has obviously struck a chord with many organisations which have realised how vulnerable they may be to that dependence.

The reaction to our survey has been amazing - and amazingly positive, apart from some concerns about cuts in training budgets - with EDI and ONIX as the current front runners among the subjects to be covered. We are keeping the survey open for another week or so and you can access it here. You don't have to be a BIC member to take part: we want the views of the whole industry and any input wil be helpful in moving this initiative forward.

WHEN TECHNOLOGY FAILS

It's been a busy week for BIC, with a meeting of our Digital Rights Group, a presentation to the PA's new chief executive, Richard Mollet, who is also the new Chair of BIC's main board, a technical implementation group meeting, and the first awards of our brand new accreditation scheme for supply chain excellence. Every time I've got back to my desk, though, the first thing has been to check whether the BIC web site was back and to field emails from those who had discovered it wasn't!

In a way it's a reassuring indication of the many diverse things BIC means to so many people that the temporary disappearance of the site causes such widespread annoyance and frustration. It's also a reminder of how much we have all come to expect information to be available immediately. Not all users of the site are our busy members: Nielsen's small publisher PubWeb users depend on it for the BIC subject category assignment tool which it uses and which has contributed so much to simplifying that chore.

So apologies all round to those who have been inconvenienced. The site has been problematic for a few months and now that it has been reinstalled on a new server I hope we shall all see a great improvement.

The results of the Supply Chain Excellence awards have been very gratifying, though there are some obvious omissions from the list of accredited companies which we hope will be filled very soon. The quality of the submissions was outstanding, especially given the quite demanding application form and the awkward time of year, with a good spread of companies large and small and in all sectors making the very best use of technology to reduce their costs, improve customer service and give themselves some much-needed competitive advantage.

THE END OF E4BOOKS

Any of you who are looking for the e4books web site, containing mainly e-commerce resource documents accumulated during the four years leading up to e-Day, will find that the site has been taken down and the links removed. The e4books campaign is officially dead.

It was a great campaign and we mourn its passing. During the course of the four years we saw dramatic changes to the way the book trade organises itself (not all of them directly in response to e4books, though many were) and we have seen the emergence of a fitter, faster supply chain as a result.

The issues addressed by the campaign have not of course completely disappeared and BIC will continue to address them as we have done in the past. We have therefore taken much of the material created for its dedicated web site across to the main BIC site, where it can be found under 'Projects and resources' in the main menu.

ACCREDITING AND BENCHMARKING

Accreditation has been one of BIC's most successful undertakings. From the original BIC tick for product information, introduced way back in June 1999, through e4books and e4libraries, these schemes have caught the attention of the industry as a way of benchmarking supply chain activity which, though vitally important, never otherwise gets into the spotlight.

This month we are launching the BIC Supply Chain Excellence Awards as a successor to the e4books accreditation scheme; and hope all members (and others) will want to apply. The best thing about this and its predecessor scheme is that it is genuinely open to organisations of all kinds, large or small, which are making the best use of available technology to run their businesses more efficiently. This aspect has been emphasised more than ever in the new scheme where the application form invites input on the much wider range of efficient activity the internet and other technologies have made possible: digital publishing, print on demand, social networking and internet marketing.

During January, we shall also be reviewing those organisations which gained
e4libraries accreditation in 2010 - and making new awards for 2011; and holding our regular quarterly meeting to make awards in the BIC Product Data Excellence scheme, the present incarnation of that original 1999 BIC tick.

All these schemes enable organisations to be recognised for the ingenious and innovative answers they have come up with to resolve complex supply chain questions, to boast a little about how much better they do things than their competitors, and to set industry benchmarks for supply chain efficiency. We don't think these things get the attention they deserve. In the tough trading environment we are all facing, the cost savings technology can provide are all-important.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2010, though maybe not the watershed year some were anticipating, has certainly been a year when future patterns for our industry have begun to emerge from the fog. There is no longer any doubt that we are confronting change on a level not seen for many decades. This, combined with recessionary times and financial instability, makes 2011 look to be an exceptionally challenging year.

BIC is very grateful to its members for their support in these past months and we wish them and all our readers a very happy Christmas and an even happier new year.

GLIMPSE OF A LIBRARY FUTURE

Our second joint seminar with NAG on the e4libraries subject headings scheme was held at CILIP yesterday and was a well-attended and stimulating event. Maggie Sumner, the retired librarian - and ex-chair of NAG - who devised the scheme for us a couple of years ago, made an impassioned plea for using the scheme as the basis for online search of library catalogues, and Ian Manson of Infor showed some impressive examples from Dutch and French libraries of how that could work in practice. Carl McInerney of Peters Bookselling Services, whilst making the point that library suppliers had benefited in the past from the variations in library servicing requirements, persuasively argued that now was the time for a 'step change' towards greater standardisation.

Clearly the library sector is entering a period of extreme stress where all options for cost-saving will have to be considered. BIC has long promoted technical excellence and standardisation as being key to a more efficient service; and attempting to establish the e4libraries scheme as a national standard is one part of that process.

Our next step is to produce a revised and updated version of the scheme in the spring - bringing it into line with the new version 2.1 of the main BIC scheme which we have just published - and, at the same time, set up proper governance procedures and a steering committee to provide a formal structure for change requests and implementation support.

STANDARDISING DIGITAL SALES REPORTING

One of the biggest challenges we have in BIC is persuading publishers of the need to automate and rationalise the way in which they process digital business in their systems. After all, if digital is going to provide incremental income - or worse, if it's going to make up for lost physical revenues - the systems for dealing with invoicing, sales analysis and royalties have got to be as efficient as they have generally become for printed books. There's nothing to be gained from setting up parallel processes which cope with a short-term problem but add to costs.

It's more than two years since BIC published a business case for standardising sales reporting; but the arguments are still as valid as ever. For a long time not much happened - and it was clear that publishers were manually processing sales reports from various vendors and intermediaries in a bewildering range of formats - and with equally bewildering variations in timings and reliability.

However, the profile of this issue has been dramatically raised in the US earlier this year with the coming of the 'agency model', making those publishers which had adopted it suddenly and brutally aware of the new obligations on them to account for the digital sales made by their 'agents'. As a direct result, our colleagues at EDItEUR have been working with the Book Industry Study Group to update the EDItX Sales Report message - which we have been recommmending as the industry's standard digital sales reporting mechanism - to take into account US needs. When the new version is released in the early part of the new year, we shall be renewing our efforts to raise awareness of this issue and encourage the industry to coalesce around a single standard for reporting digital sales.

We believe it's one of the most important issues there is for the digital supply chain.