Sean Runchman identified a gap in the market and went for it. He says there was a need for a consulting firm that specialised in pre-media but that was independent and international, and was neither a one-man band selling hard earned expertise back to the market, nor one of the business consulting leviathans with little direct pre-media knowledge.
The result of that analysis is Tunicca. Runchman, a former corporate account manager at EskoArtwork, is one half of a partnership with Dutchman Mark Kleiter, who was Runchman’s client at packaging solution company MeadWestVaco. They can, he claims, call on a network of consultants internationally that subscribe to the Tunicca methodology of pre-media business process consultancy.
“We approach everything from the business aspect,” says Runchman. “The most important thing that we do is analyse a company’s business processes.”
He insists that though he is a former EskoArtwork employee there is no relationship with the company and that Tunicca is truly independent. That said, he also accepts that if a pre-media project is packaging related, then EskoArtwork will almost certainly be involved, such is the company’s dominance in the packaging sector.
There are a number of ways that the company will deliver a service. It might be investigating opportunities for a business transformation programme; it might be an efficiency and automation project; companies might require “technology tailoring”, in which Tunicca will provide a service to time-pressed managers by analysing the need for a technology and then identifying the best market solution for that need. Quick win programmes are intended to deliver exactly what they say. The consultancy includes choosing the right purchasing plan (ie Software as a Service) as well as identifying the right technology.
“We produce Business Process maps, which we present to the customer showing hotspots, or bottlenecks, where they can improve processes or adapt for the future. You always find that in removing one hotspot another one pops up. There will always be areas for improvement. We can put a dashboard in for them to monitor workflows and see the cycle of constant improvement. The financial aspect is important though – knowing what the cost is of a job going through your system. If you have that financial baseline you can measure your improvement.”
The Tunicca methodology borrows from two separate approaches to project management, using the aspects of PMO (Project Management Office) and Prince2 that are most relevant to pre-media environments, says Runchman.
The common areas that clients have needed help with have been quite diverse so far, but the most common problem is standardisation of workflows, he says. “Many companies have grown organically and through acquisition. All of a sudden they realise that they’re working with lots of disparate systems. At first it’s not such a problem because they’re delivering, but then they need to save some costs. There has been a lot of discussion about standardising systems, especially across multinational companies.”
And Tunicca is certainly up for discussions about everything to do with pre-media. There is a blog on the website, its Pre-media Lounge on LinkedIn, Twitter feeds, and the definition of pre-media that the company placed on wikipedia. “There wasn’t one on there, so we put one on and we invite people to talk about it,” says Runchman. Coming next is Tunicca TV, which he hopes will help to progress the debate still further.
He says: “We want to have a real objective opinion and really create some debate.”
www.tunicca.com