Case Study: APS Optima
Short form
A digital twin of a newspaper that became the foundation for a whole product suite, helping APS grow into one of the best known names in newsprint across Australia and New Zealand.
The challenge
Optima began inside News Ltd, where planning every edition of every title still ran on experience, phone calls and paper. The system changed how every news desk worked. That success revealed a second opportunity: the capability itself was a product. APS needed a coherent model of how a publishing operation actually works — something a whole product line could stand on — and Optima became that foundation, sold by APS across the industry.
What we built
We created Optima, a digital twin of a newspaper. It holds the plans for every edition of every title a newspaper group owns. From that foundation APS built a suite of products: page plans for editions, financial models for editions and monthly titles, cross edition and title reservation and selling, press configuration planning, advertising rules and editorial planning.
The outcome
Once the twin existed, each new product built on the same coherent base, so every addition was faster to build and worth more than the last. The platform underpinned a product suite that came to hold more than 80% of the Australian and New Zealand newsprint market, with customer sites in the United States and Canada. It was capability, not effort, that compounded.