Presented at the IPA Technical Conference on 6/9/2009 Discover how to turn creative employees’ job-loss paranoia into great relief from monotonous tasks better suited for automation. Automation can save your business without killing its creative culture.

1. KYLE KOLBE
SENIOR MANAGER ‐ CORPORATE AND GRAPHIC TECHNOLOGY
PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES, INC.
KKOLBE@PLAYBOY.COM
AUTOPIXEL@ME.COM
Thanks Dwight.
During this presentation I want everyone to think about what tasks in your work you can
automate. I want you to preface each thought with, “If I didn’t have to do X, then I would be
free to advance my business by Y.”

2. THE SECRET OF
SUCCESSFUL
AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS
INTRODUCING AUTOMATION WITHOUT SCARING AWAY
YOUR BEST EMPLOYEES
Therein lies the secret to making automation thrive in your organization. We are all asked to
do more with less everyday. The only way to to increase your bandwidth is automate the
right processes to free your mind to figure out how you can automate more complicated
processes.

3. WORKFLOW AUTOMATION
CAN BE YOUR WEAPON TO
FIGHT COST AND UNLEASH
CREATIVITY
At Playboy, I ride a knife’s edge between corporate’s expectation to cut costs through
automation and the continued well-being of the creative departments I support. On my
more vindictive days you may see “The problem with automation is humans,” on my white
board. Or hear me mutter, “Replace them all with robots.” Yes, vindictive and short sighted.
We are not here to learn how to invent the next Terminator that will end us, but the next R2-
D2 who helps us fly our X-Wing down the Death Star’s trench.
We want a win-win situation that lightens the burden on creative processes and leads the
organization to realize cost savings.

4. YOU CAN INTRODUCE
AUTOMATION WITHOUT
SCARING YOUR CREATIVES
Think about how you can broach the subject of automation with your creative groups
without leaving the impression that you are looking for lay off volunteers. Consider
approaching automation from their perspective: what’s their benefit? Can the benefit be
shared up to the rest of the organization to satisfy corporate?

5. AUTOMATION FAILS WHEN
ITS ONLY GOAL CUTS
COSTS AND REPLACES
PEOPLE
Without taking a balanced, sensitive approach, good luck getting your surviving employees
excited about any new automated process when automation is directly related to lay offs. In
these times when morale is low, hope is lost and companies are chaotically slashing and
burning staff, workflow automation must not be seen as scythe and flamethrower. Every
efficiency gained through automation must be answered with a transformative challenge
that only creative workers can tackle with pride.
How do we discover these new challenges?

6. AUTOMATION SUCCEEDS
WHEN IT FREES YOUR
WORKFORCE TO DO MORE
CREATIVE WORK
The time, effort and expense of implementing successful workflow automation is only
worth it when you can transform and expand the way your creative teams work.
Automation can give the gift of time in the development stage of creative projects leading
to a better end product. You can rebalance your creative workflow with automation.
The ideal creative workflow is split up into three phases: development, refinement and
proofing. The time split between these main phases should allow the most time in
development (60% of the total production time), less time in refinement (30%) and the least
time in proofing (10%). To achieve this up front balance the workflow must shift expensive
tasks to the front of the development process and automate other late stage tasks.
Is your production timeline balanced in this way? If not, it’s time to discover how automation
can strike that balance.

7. DECONSTRUCT YOUR
EXISTING WORKFLOWS
Before you even know what type of automation technology could help you, you need to shine
a harsh light on your existing workflows. Many creative employees and departments don’t
think about workflow in a structured way. They welcome chaotic content, process it
sideways in mistake loops and pass the mess on to the next sucker downstream. What’s the
result? An overburdened final production department that must deal with each mess in a new
and disabling way. They must dedicate time to finding images instead of color correcting.
Guess who suffers? Your customers.
Discovery of your real existing workflows is paramount to your new workflows’ success.
How do you cut through everyone’s personal agendas to find the true way your
organization needs to work?

8. TO SURVIVE DISCOVERY,
CREATIVE EMPLOYEES LIE
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/KATIETEGTMEYER/
Sometimes while struggling through the latest workflow discovery meeting with a creative
group, I have to wonder whether I would gather just as much information and come to the
same new workflow directions working in solitary. Discovery interviews are hard, but
necessary.
Just as you propose an automated solution to a problem from the previous meeting, you are
told “That’s not a problem we have.”
So, how do you cut through the contradictions and 180 degree turns? Simply cut to the core
of the process, whittle it down until it is a single goal without complication. You need to
achieve this purity to convince the groups you are helping that they need your help.

9. SIDELINE EXCEPTIONS
TO THE RULE
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/FLATTOP341/
The discovery process is brought to its knees by exceptions to the rule. “We can’t just drop
all our photos in your black box! The Mansion needs to view the originals all the time and we
can’t change how they work.”
You must challenge every exception. Most do not stand up to the simplest challenge, “How
often does the mansion need to see these?” “Well this one time three years ago…” Exactly.
Put exceptions in their place: away from the rule. Reassure the exception queen that each
anomaly can be dealt with on a per case basis that will not affect the remaining 98% of the
automated work.

10. WORKFLOW REDESIGNS FOLLOW
ACTIONS, NOT WORDS
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/THEOGEO/
If you are intimate with the existing process, you can make new workflow directions based
on what they do, not what they say. Many times creative employees lack perspective on their
own processes and how they affect others. So when asked about their process, answers are
often vague and inaccurate. If you have the chance, observe their work habits. You can track
jobs by initial and final organization and time spent processing. Try to recreate their process
the best way you know how, but lacking any of the conveniences of automation. The
processes that can be automated will reveal themselves through their glaring monotonous
difficulty.
Follow the action.

11. LEAVE CREATIVE DECISIONS TO
HUMANS
Differentiate between the strengths of the human mind and those of the computer. Creative
workflow automation should never have as many logic gates as a chess playing computer,
but you have the opportunity to introduce some conditional intelligence to route your
workflows down multiple paths. Though you can have an automated workflow distribute
images to many destinations and flag troublesome files, you need the human brain to make
creative decisions based on taste, peer feedback, whimsy and wit.
Always keep in mind that you need humans to create and improve the work, make
connections, critique and approve.

12. IDENTIFY TECHNICAL
RESOURCES BEST FIT FOR
YOUR AUTOMATION LEVEL
After you discover what you can automate, you evaluate the technical resources needed to
achieve your goals. Once the technology is proposed you can plan your workflows in a flow
charting program like OmniGraffle. Flow charting the process will reveal gaps and
redundancies and eliminating them now will save valuable time later.

13. REALIZE YOUR POTENTIAL
HOW HIGH CAN YOU CLIMB THE AUTOMATION LADDER?
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/40737396@N00/
Hopefully you won’t have as much trouble as this salmon. Let’s explore how high you can
climb the automation ladder. Maybe you’ve already taken a few steps into this technology
category. I’m going to outline the technology at three basic rungs of the ladder. Each rung
builds on the tools described in the previous rungs. Automation can start small, but the
possibilities are endless.

14. CLIMBING THE AUTOMATION
LADDER: RUNG 1
AUTOMATION FOR THE
INDIVIDUAL CREATIVE
ADOBE CREATIVE
SUITE
APPLE AUTOMATOR
GRIDIRON FLOW
So what can we automate with the creative tools we already have? Quite a bit, if you can
contain your workflows to yourself and clearly hand off well organized work to others. I
hope everyone that deals with the Applications in Adobe’s Creative Suite has taken
advantage of their automation features, from building a web gallery to changing image
names, to templates and style sheets, to transforming one hundred digital camera raw
images into JPGs. Apple’s Automator is another great automation tool that’s easy to jump
into. Grid Iron Flow is a new tool that can help organize your different projects automatically
based on metadata.
The automations you can achieve on your desktop are great time savers to a point. While
the automation is running are you using your time well? Or do you try to keep focus on
your Facebook page between Photoshop flipping to the front with each image processed.
Wouldn’t it be great to move these tasks at least to the background and at best to another
system entirely? What if you don’t want every image in a queue treated the same by your
automation? You want to conditionally apply a watermarked logo to the longest edge of a
photo? Without jumping into scripting, you have to manually separate dissimilar but grouped
images. Now how much time have you lost?
On the desktop, automation loses many of its attractive features. With our tight schedules
we have little patience for automation’s shortcomings.

15. CLIMBING THE AUTOMATION
LADDER: RUNG 2
AUTOMATION FOR THE
DEVELOPER
ADOBE CS SCRIPTING
OS X SIPS
DRUPAL
The next step up the ladder loses the GUI. Automation doesn’t have to be confined to
professional desktop applications or expensive enterprise solutions.
All of Adobe’s Creative Suite is scriptable. That means you can apply conditional logic to a
series of Photoshop actions and commands or present decision making dialog boxes based
on XMP metadata.
If you have a large group of images you need to shift to another file format, resize and
transform color profiles, you need to tap into OS X’s SIPS on the command line. It is an
extremely powerful and fast tool that will take full advantage of your Mac’s multiple
processors and you can continue working on your next task while runs invisibly.
The open source web content management system, Drupal, can be used as a workflow
system with the right addition of add-on modules, like the Rules module. Drupal’s flexible
nature lends itself to publishing workflow, image asset management, knowledge bases, wikis,
help desk.
Once you have built some scripts you will want to share your new efficiencies with the rest of
your organization. But how?
http://drupal.org/project/rules
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/sips.1.html
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/scripting/index.html

16. CLIMBING THE AUTOMATION
LADDER: RUNG 3
AUTOMATION FOR THE
ENTERPRISE
ENFOCUS
POWERSWITCH
VJOON K4
ADOBE INDESIGN
SERVER,
MADETOPRINT,
ELPICAL CLARO, PDF
TOOLBOX
If dealing with workgroups larger than 12 people, 3 departments or remote sites,
centralized automation is highly beneficial. You give each group a single place to go for
each automated task, say a hot folder. You give them basic file and metadata requirements
for hot folder ingestion, realistic time expectations and clear next steps to retrieve the
output files.
At Playboy, we use Enfocus PowerSwitch to process photo shoots destined for our digital
asset management system, Telescope, and online photo editing system, GlobalEdit.
PowerSwitch is the nerve center of the workflow that calls on other automated applications to
move assets through the flow. PowerSwitch can take PDF output from our publishing
system’s K4 MadeToPrint plug-in and run it through PDF Toolbox’s preflight and FTP the files
to our printer. In the future we plan to use Elpical Claro Premedia Server to pre-process
images destined for image technicians in both print and web.
Let’s look more closely at the digital photo processing workflow.

17. DAM INGESTION FLOW
USERS SIMPLY DROP IMAGES IN A HOT FOLDER AND FIND
PROCESSED DNGS AND JPGS ON THE OTHER SIDE.
The PowerSwitch workflow illustrated here can accept directory hierarchies full of subfolders
of DNGs and other image types that are unwanted derivatives of the DNGs. All images are
parsed through the Sort Job tool and DNGs are passed to Photoshop to be exported into
1200 pixel sRGB JPGs ready for attachment to a new global edit job for photo editing. The
JPGs retain their original folder structure to facilitate communication with the original
photographer. The DNGs lose their folder hierarchy and are placed in a single folder for easy
ingestion into the DAM.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Kyle, weren’t you just complaining about how slow and
intrusive Photoshop was as an automation tool?” Well, yes, but sometimes you have to satisfy
the critical eye of your photo team. This flow started out with a command line call to SIPS
where you see Photoshop now. Processing the DNGs through SIPS was lightning fast, four
times as fast as Photoshop with the same basic result. I bragged for weeks during testing
and initial implementation about the speed. Then the photographers noticed that the JPGs
they were editing in Global Edit were wildly different than the original DNG files as
processed by Adobe Camera Raw. The metadata that defined the look of the images was only
known to Adobe Camera Raw. SIPS was using Apple’s Raw engine to interpret the color
and tone. Until Raw processing adopts a universal standard we are stuck using Photoshop,
the tool used by the photographers, for a task better suited for the command line.

18. ENCOURAGE AUTOMATION
ADOPTION BY FOSTERING
CREATIVITY
How can we grow automation in a hostile environment? You can’t. You must temper every
step of automation adoption with creativity to fight withering morale.

19. WITH REDUCED HEAD COUNT, AUTOMATION OFTEN SAVES THE
DAY, BUT AT WHAT COST TO THE CREATIVE EGO?
0
15
30
45
60
Full Staff RIF 1 RIF 2 RIF 3
Automation Cost Savings Automation Adoption
Head Count Reduction
We have to break workflow automation’s link with cold cost savings. Every time we try to
push more automation after a reduction in force, the effort is met with more hostility from
the creatives. After a few rounds of RIFS, adoption collapses and automation’s cost savings
declines to eventual failure.
What’s missing? How can we turn automation efforts into a positive force?

20. YOU MUST REDIRECT THEIR EFFORTS TO NEW OR REVIVED
TASKS THAT WILL INVIGORATE THEIR CREATIVE MIND
0
20
40
60
80
Full Staff RIF 1 RIF 2 RIF 3
Automation Cost Savings Automation Adoption
Head Count Reduction Effort to Foster Creativity
If you are able to automate tasks once held dear by your remaining employees after a
reduction in force, you must redirect their efforts to new or revived tasks that will
invigorate their creative mind. The more you automate the more time you are buying back
for creatives to do what they do best: think up new ways to improve your products and
business. In an organization that makes an ever increasing effort to foster creativity we see
the potential for more automation adoption leading to cost savings that eliminate the need
for the third RIF. Automation can build value in your people, transforming your business for
the better.
At Playboy, our automation strategy seeks to rebalance creative product development,
refinement and proofing. Before our latest workflow automation push, our magazine
production staff spent the majority of their schedule in proofing: manually printing
editorial proofs, updating folios and cropping and preflighting final PDFs for delivery to
press. With the recent closing of our New York office, the same team adopted editorial
production duties including K4 article attachment and custom style sheet creation. To make
it possible to adopt the new and more creative refinement tasks, we had to automate the
final page production from proofing to final PDF delivery. With help from Axio MadeToPrint
triggered by K4 workflow status changes, we are able to offload printing and PDF creation to
a central server. We tied K4 to MEI’s ALS Direct Ad and Issue Planning system to push
automatic folios to all layouts. We eliminated cropping of final press PDFs with a simple
template format change. MadeToPrint exports individual pages following an existing naming
convention for final PDF production. Finally, the PDFs are run through PDF Toolbox’s
preflight tools and any flagged files are sent to a QA queue through integration with
PowerSwitch.
So how do you get to your automation goal after you’ve discovered what you can automate,
adopted the right technology and led your staff to adopt automation with the promise of
higher creativity?

21. TEST,TRAIN, IMPLEMENT
AND GROW THROUGH
REVIEW
You must test all your new tools and workflows first in a development environment and
then in production. You need to knowledge share relevant aspects of the automation
system with your support staff and its end users. Remember, you should strive to always
improve your existing flows and discover new methods to automate more of your creative
business. You cannot grow without feedback from users of the system. When they grow
dissatisfied with the quality, speed or price of the automation system explain how they need
to sacrifice one to gain from the other two.
Here are some tips on testing and implementation.

22. TESTING WILL DESTROY YOUR
IMAGE ASSETS
When I was figuring out how PowerSwitch’s Execute Command tool worked, almost every
combination of settings I tried would simply disappear my images. Poof, gone. The point is
to work on copies of assets while testing and in production. Disaster will strike and you do
not want the struggling effort of your centralized automation system to be blamed for
losing the last 3 day photo shoot. Assets should pass through the automation server, ending
up in another secure storage area, ready for the next process.

23. DON’T COMPLICATE ENTRY
ONE WAY IN, ONE WAY OUT. YOUR AUTOMATION SYSTEM
NEEDS SINGLE ENTRY AND EXIT POINTS
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/THE_HOOKUPS/
In a perfect world, every creative group could just dump their assets into a single hot folder
and their job could be parsed out to whatever automation process is needed. Since
automation systems cannot read minds (unless you are very thorough with metadata), we
must present a single point of entry per major process and department. We should strive to
give each employee or department a single entry point and exit point. Keeping it simple
transforms your needed training into a simple file path.

24. WAITING FOR THE MAIL
COMMUNICATE AUTOMATED JOB STATUS TO THE
ORIGINATOR
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/AVIGON/
Sending feedback to the user about the status of their job will save everyone much
frustration.
At Playboy, we have had trouble implementing this step in our image processing workflows.
To the end user a “job” is the complete set of image files related to a photo shoot. The
number of images in a shoot can reach into the thousands. We would like to send an email
informing the originator when their job is finished but PowerSwitch sees each file as a job,
so it wants to send thousands of emails for a single grouping. We attempted to use Switch’s
job grouping and ungrouping tools but they choked on large count of files (14,000). Switch
has other tools to group assets that we continue to investigate.

25. BUILD YOUR TECHNICAL ARSENAL
OF AUTOMATION MODULES
HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/MANWOMANDOG/
Once you start building automated flows you find yourself using the same tools over again.
Some of the advanced features of PowerSwitch have a steep learning curve but once mastered
they can be duplicated and integrated into any other flow you can imagine. Learn and build
something new every week with your automation technology and you will soon have quite an
arsenal at your disposal.

26. REMEMBER, WE ARE THE
AUTOMATONS’ MASTERS…
…we just need to program them to free us but not let us go.

27. GATHER YOUR CREATIVE
DEPARTMENTS TOGETHER
TO START THE PROCESS OF
SUCCESSFUL AUTOMATION
I hope I’ve got you excited about automation. Now I want you to go back to your
organizations and figure out how you can foster creativity while automating tasks not meant
for our minds.

28. THANK YOU AND
QUESTIONS
Thanks for your attention. We can now open the floor for questions for Adam, Dwight and I.
[end on info slide]

29. KYLE KOLBE
SENIOR MANAGER ‐ CORPORATE AND GRAPHIC TECHNOLOGY
PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES, INC.
KKOLBE@PLAYBOY.COM
AUTOPIXEL@ME.COM