Manufacturer accelerates supply chain processing time with automation

Company overview

Newsday Media Group is a leading media organization based in New York. Founded in 1940, the company delivers local news, investigative journalism and digital media products. Its portfolio includes print and digital subscriptions, community publications and advertising services.

As Newsday expanded from a print-centric model into digital news and audience analytics, its teams required predictable and observable automation for circulation, billing, delivery, financial close and data workflows.

Business challenges

As Newsday prepared to migrate from its legacy mainframe circulation system to the more modern Naviga Circulation, its automation landscape was fragmented. Critical processes for circulation, billing, delivery, finance and analytics were spread across cron jobs, Windows Task Scheduler, Microsoft System Center, ETL tools and custom scripts owned by different teams. This resulted in a high total cost of ownership (TCO) and made it hard for a lean operations group to see end-to-end workflows, troubleshoot quickly and retain knowledge as consultants and specialists rolled off projects.

Facing strict deadlines and a high-stakes migration where billing runs couldn’t fail, the team was working long hours. They needed a solution that would turn a chaotic 9-to-9 struggle into a manageable, predictable workload. From day one, subscription billing, receivables, delivery-route workflows and financial transactions feeding the general ledger all had to run reliably. Naviga’s native batch model uses standard file-based inputs and scheduling to execute core processing. To integrate these critical tasks into a broader, automated ecosystem, Newsday needed to extend these capabilities with enterprise-level orchestration.

Sherwin Rubio, Lead Programmer Analyst, knew the Operations team would remain lean even as process demands increased. The organization needed an automation approach that respected people’s time and expertise: a single, consistent framework to ensure that even in the middle of the night, an operator could safely right-click and restart a process without needing a developer on the line.

Solution

Newsday built on its existing investment in RunMyJobs by Redwood, which had been in place since 2018, and made it the hub for orchestrating mission-critical operations as circulation and finance transitioned to modern platforms. The team anchored its strategy in a people-first principle.

“My philosophy is to build for the people you have, not the people you wish you had,” Sherwin explains. “It’s fundamentally a people-first approach to innovation.”

Instead of adding more niche tools, Newsday centered automation on skills the team already had — SQL, scripting, Python and deep operational knowledge — and used RunMyJobs as the common fabric tying systems together. They established clear expectations for maintainability, reliability and operator comfort. Sherwin and the team design with on-call staff in mind, ensuring they can see what’s happening, understand failures and safely intervene at any hour, without needing to consult with developers.

Newsday then used RunMyJobs to standardize how work runs across the business. As circulation, billing and financial close workflows were rebuilt on modern platforms, they moved away from one-off cron jobs, Task Scheduler entries and custom scripts. End-to-end business processes now run through shared patterns in a single platform, giving operators a consistent way to monitor, support and recover critical jobs with a lean team.

For data and analytics, Newsday chose to orchestrate SQL and Python directly in RunMyJobs instead of introducing another ETL tool. 

The company’s people-first model now extends beyond circulation and finance into distribution, audience analytics and emerging advertising workflows, all visible through RunMyJobs dashboards and Redwood Insights.

Results

Newsday realized measurable improvements in operational reliability, automation delivery and cross-department efficiency once processes were consolidated in RunMyJobs.

• 83% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR), thanks to consistent patterns, centralized monitoring and clearer operator actions
• Reduced tool footprint and lower TCO, decreasing the number of platforms to license, host and manage
• Lean team support for 145+ standardized processes, simplifying audits, support and long-term maintenance while enabling more work with the same staff
• 800+ automation builds delivered during the Naviga migration, enabled by reusable templates and parameter-driven designs that shortened design, testing and deployment cycles
• Transformational changes delivered in days instead of weeks, even for weekly and monthly run windows, enabling the business to respond faster to new requirements without adding complexity
• Greater focus on strategic work, with the team spending more time on analytics and onboarding new business units as recurring operations become more reliable and require less manual oversight

These outcomes reflect improved operational stability, better governance and a more predictable technology environment.

The future with Redwood

RunMyJobs now acts as Newsday’s orchestration engine across circulation, finance, distribution, analytics and emerging advertising workflows. Looking ahead, Newsday plans to:

• Onboard additional teams using the established patterns
• Expand automation observability with Redwood Insights
• Continue refining people-first standards for maintainability, clarity and operator experience

By designing automation around the people who use and support it, Newsday has built a sustainable, scalable foundation for future growth — and a concrete example of how a leading Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) helps organizations unleash human potential. 

Read Sherwin’s perspective on his team’s approach to collaborative automation adoption and their effective communication framework, supported by RunMyJobs.