So what are the benefits of having a real-time system if it’s more complex and expensive? The benefits are many, and for high-frequency publications and Web sites you could say they are a requirement.

For one thing, customer information is easier to access and faster to update. ESP’s first fulfillment customer was a daily publication, so from the beginning it was a requirement to have changes affected immediately. Orders and changes entered today have to make it on tomorrow’s publication. If the subscriber didn’t get the paper on time, about the only thing yesterday’s newspaper was good for was to wrap fish. As the Internet became more widely used, expectations for real-time retrieval of subscriber information grew. The only good solution was a real-time database. ESP’s visionary programmers, at the beginning of the development of ESP’s fulfillment system, understood this and developed the real-time system decades before other fulfillment houses.

The speed of problem solving is another advantage that you get with a real-time database. There are not many fulfillment houses that provide clients with this type of database. Many of them will collect the data with a pretty front end, but then apply it in a batch. With a real-time database, all information is available for retrieval as soon as it is entered in the system. Transactions aren’t accumulated and then run in a daily or weekly update, as is required by a batch system. For example, when a subscriber makes a change to his or her record online at one of our client’s ESP-hosted customer service pages, that record is updated immediately. The same subscriber can go back immediately to his or her record and see the change.