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May 9 – May 15, 2011 Edition HarperCollins, RR Donnelley Team on Printing, Fulfillment
NEW YORK and CHICAGO/AUTHORLINK NEWS/May 12, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — HarperCollins Publishers and RR Donnelley (Nasdaq:RRD) today announced their intent to enter into a breakthrough global supply chain agreement. The agreement is the first of its kind for a major general trade publisher.
Under the terms of the proposed agreement, beginning in November 2011, RR Donnelley will handle the fulfillment of all HarperCollins new releases from its Harrisonburg, VA facility. Additionally, beginning in July 2012, RR Donnelley will handle fulfillment of all frontlist and backlist titles for Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.
RR Donnelley will also provide global Print on Demand (POD) services to HarperCollins, enabling most titles to be printed anywhere HarperCollins holds publishing rights. The agreement also renews and expands RR Donnelley’s role as the printer, binder and distributor of HarperCollins’ conventionally produced titles.
The two companies have enjoyed a relationship for more than 20 years as RR Donnelley has printed the vast majority of HarperCollins and Zondervan titles. This agreement will expand the relationship to combine printing, fulfillment, and shipping services into a single workflow which will serve to increase the speed to market, reduce freight costs, and improve efficiencies in the distribution process.
“In light of the shifting publishing landscape, we determined that it made the most business sense to move our new release fulfillment from several disparate warehouses to one central location tied closely to our printing,” said Larry Nevins, EVP of Operations and Technology for HarperCollins Publishers. “RR Donnelley has long been a trusted and valued partner of ours, and this integrated solution will bring significant efficiencies to the supply chain process.”
HarperCollins and Zondervan will continue to handle credit, collection and customer service internally for its businesses and reorders will continue to be shipped from their Scranton, PA Distribution Center.
Later this year, RR Donnelley will use the latest advances in digital printing to provide Global POD services to HarperCollins Publishers, enabling most titles to be produced anywhere HarperCollins holds the publishing rights. Most HarperCollins books will be available in each territory in any format (print or digital) in a matter of minutes.
“As a global English-language publisher, our supply chain must meet the needs of our customers everywhere to provide our authors with the broadest possible reach for their work, regardless of physical location,” said Brian Murray, President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers. “Our vision is to have the entire HarperCollins book catalog available for customers in all major territories and ready for delivery in minutes. This agreement with RR Donnelley provides new capabilities which will allow us to achieve this goal. In the U.S., time and money are saved by co-locating printing and fulfillment for fast moving titles. In the UK and Australia, POD technology will enable us to competitively offer the entire HarperCollins catalog to customers without expensive freight costs and long lead times.”
“These changes will serve to not only increase our operating efficiency and lower costs; they will also help to reduce our environmental impact. HarperCollins remains committed to reducing its carbon footprint, and more efficient shipping and paper use will go a long way towards helping us achieve these goals,” added Murray.
“The investments that RR Donnelley has made to create a broad-based digital infrastructure were designed to provide the resources that enable exactly this kind of innovative supply chain solution,” said Thomas J. Quinlan, III, President and CEO of RR Donnelley. “For example, we have put our proprietary ProteusJet(TM) high speed digital printing presses in line with automated binding equipment for fast and efficient POD. These resources will work in combination with the sophisticated logistics capabilities we have built to manage our customers’ distribution requirements. We look forward to serving HarperCollins in this breakthrough program of service.”
About HarperCollins Publishers
HarperCollins, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world, is a subsidiary of News Corporation (Nasdaq:NWS) (Nasdaq:NWSA) (ASX:NWS) (ASX:NWSLV). Headquartered in New York, HarperCollins has publishing groups around the world including the HarperCollins General Books Group, HarperCollins Children’s Books Group, Zondervan, HarperCollins UK, HarperCollins Canada, HarperCollins Australia/New Zealand and HarperCollins India. HarperCollins is a broad-based publisher with strengths in literary and commercial fiction, business books, children’s books, cookbooks, mystery, romance, reference, religious and spiritual books. With nearly 200 years of history HarperCollins has published some of the world’s foremost authors and has won numerous awards including the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott. Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, HarperCollins is the first publisher to digitize its content and create a global digital warehouse to protect the rights of its authors, meet consumer demand and generate additional business opportunities. You can visit HarperCollins Publishers on the Internet at http://www.harpercollins.com.
About RR Donnelley
RR Donnelley (Nasdaq:RRD) is a global provider of integrated communications. Founded more than 146 years ago, the company works collaboratively with more than 60,000 customers worldwide to develop custom communications solutions that reduce costs, enhance ROI and ensure compliance. Drawing on a range of proprietary and commercially available digital and conventional technologies deployed across four continents, the company employs a suite of leading Internet based capabilities and other resources to provide premedia, printing, logistics and business process outsourcing products and services to leading clients in virtually every private and public sector. For more information and for RR Donnelley’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report, visit the company’s web site at www.rrdonnelley.com.
