Mediahuis Completes Migration to Advantage with 3rd Go-Live
Congratulations to Mediahuis, whose Belgium office (MHB) recently completed its second of two go-lives on Advantage. This large implementation project began in November 2017 and was planned with three go-lives across two offices. The first phase was completed in October 2018 when Mediahuis Limburg (MHL) successfully converted off their legacy P5 system and began fulfilling their daily Dutch newspaper, De Limburger, through Advantage after an 11-month project.
The MHB team that was involved from the start, assisting with the MHL project while also working on their implementation in parallel, was able to celebrate their first go-live in early November 2019. The most recent go-live, in December 2019, marked the last of three fulfillment systems at Mediahuis that were planned to migrate to Advantage.
“The go-live of a new subscription management system is a 'once-in-career' event. As such, one can’t acquire a lot of experience in it,” explains Koen Maes, Director Media Services. “On top of that, the complexity is very high with a lot of interfaces between systems and dependencies between business units: the system is a bridge between the editors, sales and the reader. All this means that, on the one hand, there is no room for improvisation, while on the other, we need to have the flexibility to manage future growth and improvements that are not yet known. I admire and recognize the resilience and team spirit of the project team that searched for and implemented such a solid solution.”
The team for this final go-live included Ruben Bracke, Karen De Ridder, Noël Berghs, Wout Geysels, Petra Jansen, Dirk Maegh, Nyrio Parmentier, Jo Samyn, Ben Selleslagh, Peter Snoeckx, Johan Thijsen, Jurgen Van den Broeck, Tim Van Goubergen, Katrien Van Peteghem, Hilde Verhellen, Davy Valckenborgh and Ben Willaert. In addition to this core team, many others assisted in testing, preparing the legacy data or in one of the many projects within the subscription ecosystem.
On the AdvantageCS side, Levi Hyssong led the project, with major assistance from Corey Mantel, Jeff Leonard and Philippe Rowland. Jeff and Philippe each spent three months on site in Antwerp during the project.
Mediahuis is a newspaper publisher in Belgium which was founded in 2013 as a joint venture of two Flemish corporations---Corelio and Concentra. The company’s roots, however, date back to 1879 when its first newspaper was published. Today’s Mediahuis encompasses radio stations, television stations, websites, and classified platforms, and, with the 2015 acquisition of the Dutch Telegraaf Media Groep, it added a large group of daily and weekly publications and doubled its circulation size.
After determining that developing an in-house solution to replace their separate fulfillment systems was not feasible, Mediahuis conducted a thorough search and chose Advantage as the replacement system to support their business now and for the future.
Congratulations to all!