Late last week, both Transcontinental and Rogers Publishing announced Pressexpress — a collaborative revised ad-close schedule for its monthly consumer titles. The system, says Jacqueline Howe, group publisher at Transcontinental will allow advertisers to submit material up to two weeks before the impact date, when the issue is mailed to subscribers. It will take 16 days off of Trancontinental’s monthly consumer titles production cycles.

This change in production systems is important, says Howe because of a need for greater flexibility in the industry. “There is a perception that the cycle time for magazines is two and a half to three months and we wanted to make our process as efficient as possible,” she says. “We took a look at our own cycle to see where we had buffers. It is the more space you have, the more you take up. You move into a bigger house and somehow you fill it up, you move into a smaller place and condense it.”

Though Howe says that the addition of the AdDirect portal earlier this year has helped the production cycle it did not have to come before Pressexpress was introduced. “It is allowing companies to save time but it wasn’t built into this particular production cycle,” she says.

Pressexpress launches January 2010 for both publishing companies, and will be rolled out in additional titles beginning with the March/April issues. The shortened lead times follow similar initiatives in the U.S. publishing industry earlier this year. Mediaweek reported in April on magazines at Hearst, Merideth and Wenner Media shaving weeks off their production cycles.