IT Outsourcing Success Story
Enciclopèdia Catalana was founded in 1965 and is part of the Fundació Enciclopèdia Catalana, a private publishing group whose mission is to promote and disseminate the Catalan language and culture. This is achieved through cultural activities, digital reference content, promoting reading, and supporting literary creation and publishing.
The foundation offers free access to the portal enciclopedia.cat, collaborates in the National Children’s and Youth Reading Aloud Contest, and sponsors major Catalan literary awards such as the Premi Sant Jordi, Premi Mercè Rodoreda, and Premi Josep M. Folch i Torres.
It also publishes works through its imprints, including La Galera, Univers, Bridge, Rata, Catedral, Diccionaris de l’Enciclopèdia, Text-La Galera, Enciclopèdia Art, and participates in the Grup 62.
Finally, it manages the distributor Àgora, overseeing the entire supply chain process between publishers and sales points.
How important is the IT structure in your business?
Grupo Enciclopèdia has a complex IT structure that supports One-to-One Art Sales with Credit Management, School Textbook Publishing (prescriptive sales), Bookstore Publishing (for both children and adults, in Catalan and Spanish), and the Distribution Company, which manages the physical and financial flows of books in the bookstore and school markets for multiple publishers organized into various networks.
In Grupo Enciclopèdia, customer portfolio management, prescriptive network management, editorial and online creation systems, and logistics management for warehouses with over 30,000 references and eight million copies are highly relevant.
Given this conceptual diversity, the Group’s systems have specialized, always “in-house,” in business systems, developing multiple advanced specific solutions.
Our broad IT infrastructure has been entrusted to Gesisa for the past 30 years.
GESISA has been managing our IT infrastructure since the 1990s, offering numerous solutions over the years. Some examples include:
- We developed Warehouse Management Systems 20 years ago and were among the first to optimize operations using radiofrequency capabilities, thanks to GESISA.
- Over a decade ago, GESISA led us into Server Virtualization, significantly enhancing our platform’s flexibility and resilience.
- Decades ago, initiated by GESISA, we began using Remote Desktops on dedicated servers and were among the first publishing groups to adopt Office365. When remote work suddenly became necessary, we were more prepared than we could have imagined!
- We have always had Datawarehouse exploitation environments with Excel-Pivot Tables-ODBC widely used in our management culture. GESISA’s pioneering introduction of Power BI, combined with our mastery of large data volumes, proved unstoppable.
SOLUTION provided by GESISA
Degree of satisfaction with the implemented solution
GESISA has managed our IT infrastructure for over three decades.
Our relationship with GESISA extends beyond managing our servers, communications, installations, operating systems, office software, and user support (including remote work!).
GESISA has consistently provided us with FORESIGHT and VISION.
