Topps, Inc.

The Client: Topps is an international marketer of entertainment products, principally collectible trading cards, confections, sticker collections, and collectible strategy games. Topps also manufactures the popular lollipop brands marketed as Ring Pops, Push Pops, Baby Bottle Pops and other novelty candy.

Background: Because Topps’ products require specialized publishing and content management expertise, most card products have an extensive and distinct production cycle. Baseball card production include design, research, content generation, image collection and manipulation, write-ups, fact checks, licensor reviews, prepress, imposition, etc.

At any moment in time, there could be up to 7,000 cards in production with over 40,000 individual images and data elements that need to be identified, received and cataloged, and then staged for composition. Data elements may include sporting statistics, special logos, pictures and picture frames, trademarks, and other pieces of information that make each Topps baseball card unique.

Problem: Topps experienced a difficult time handling the production of thousands of unique baseball card products and schedules in an efficient manner. The amount of detail involved with creating each baseball card limited management’s ability to standardize the various tasks, streamline production, and have faster product launches.

Solution: Rex Three’s technology division analyzed and documented Topps’ publishing and production operations to employ targeted business process management techniques that would meet the needs of all the stakeholders. After breaking each project into 27 task groups, Rex Three designed an optimized workflow simplify the majority of tasks and milestones by developing a customized, web-based tool called The Topps Card Factory®.

The Topps Card Factory® gave the production team the ability to:

• Locate the progress of products in the production cycle by drilling down on various projects and assignments
• Layout card images to various card templates faster by using web-based cropping tools without the need of expensive design software requiring advanced design software skills
• Streamline approval routing and task assignments to finalize edits more quickly

Business Improvements:

• Reduced manufacturing time by compressing existing production processes
• Increased sales potential by empowering employees to introduce more relevant and timely card products into the market
• Minimized human errors involved with creating unique content for various baseball card products
• Saved time and money by using advanced cropping, prepress, and proofing tools
• Increased sales cycle by shortening manufacturing time