Improving our customer's overall performance is one of Miles 33's main goals. Here are the main areas where the adoption of Miles 33 systems produces business improvements.

•Standard platforms

The use of standard operating systems and hardware platforms translates to reduced costs - both in terms of initial investment and of maintenance.

In addition, the use of a common platform across all systems further reduces the maintenance costs: sharing of training and knowledge, reduced server count.

•Overall systems' productivity

Miles 33's systems are designed with productivity as a central focus: e.g. standard newspaper pages can be created very quickly in Fred4, and so on. This translates to better productivity.

The integrated nature of Tera's systems leads to further productivity improvements. One example is the integration of editorial with Tark archiving that translates to faster and easier archiving.

'La Nación', the largest Costa Rican media group, reports that the deployment of Tark increased productivity more than 300% in the number of files processed daily by the group's Documentation Center. Before the migration, La Nación had an average of 4 minutes per file. With Tera's solutions, the processing time has dropped to 45 seconds per file.

For another example, we can look at the Northcliffe group in the UK, that automatically produces the Web sites for all of its publications using a very limited centralized staff, thanks to the automatic XML data feeds created by the Miles 33 systems installed in all Northcliffe centres.

•New source of revenues

Miles 33 's systems can be the base of new revenue sources. The New Straits Times group in Malaysia is using Tark to sell its digital content (texts and images) to the public online.

In the UK, Northcliffe group has had a centralized Tark archive since 2002, that is fed by each of the group's title.  This archive will be used to sell images online. Most of the individual newspapers currently sell images directly from their own local Tark archives.