Installation of the of QuickLayout – replacing an Atex edition builder product – and the Optima Edition Viewer is already underway, with the contract with the APN News & Media company formally signed last week.

APN New Zealand produces the flagship national daily ‘New Zealand Herald’ as well as regional daily and community  newspapers in New Zealand, and the APS systems will be installed in all 23 offices integrated with Atex’s Genera advertising booking and editorial systems. APS will provide integration, supply, implementation and training.

APN director of business improvement Mark Kay is delighted with the decision: “We believe both these solutions will have significant benefit to our sales teams and our advertising customers.

“The functionality available with QuickLayout and Optima Viewer will provide us with the visibility we need to better manage our business. We are looking forward to working with the APS team to roll these applications out across our newspapers”.

The contract comes on the back of the completion of a two-year joint development project with News Limited, which has both of APS’s products installed, throughout 14 sites in Australia. In the News project, APS installed AutoLayout – which brings forward the creation of an edition plan for each issue of each newspaper to the moment space is booked – and Sales Viewer, a software product which enables the publisher to gain an overview of the available space including premium positions across all publication and editions.

APS sales director Terry Flynn says that it has been a very busy 12 months for the company including the need to juggle both the APN and News projects. “These two projects coincided with the final go-lives of QuickLayout and Optima Viewer at both the ‘New York Post’ and ‘Seattle Times’.

“We’ve also taken orders recently from four separate independent newspapers for our Synergy advertising booking system, which have been installed in New Zealand and Australia over the past six months.”