Affinity Systems recently completed a very successful project for Ivey Publishing, a division of Canada’s premier business school — the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London. Ivey Publishing manages and distributes the business case study collection for the Richard Ivey School of Business. Ivey has been using the "case" method since 1922 to teach practical management skills to undergraduate, graduate and executive students. Since 1999, Ivey has ranked as one of the top 30 business schools in the world, according to the Financial Times.

Ivey Publishing is the leader in providing business case studies with a global perspective. With over 8,000 products in its own collection, which includes videos and reprints from the Ivey Business Journal, Ivey Publishing maintains over 3,400 active cases in all major disciplines. In order to keep the collection current, more than 200 classroom-tested case studies are added to the collection each year. Products are marketed to Ivey students and to other academic institutions, corporations and individuals worldwide. In addition, Ivey Publishing is the distributor of several other collections, and is the Canadian distributor of Harvard Business School cases and Harvard Business Review reprints. The total material collection consists of more than 40,000 items.

Affinity Systems was selected by Ivey Publishing to design and develop a web-based application that supports Ivey’s business of selling case studies on line to an international market of professors and students. The iveycases.com site is much more than an e-commerce vehicle. In addition to selling cases on line, the system supports and manages a complex administration of case authors and writers, third-party distributors of Ivey cases, copyright management, third-party suppliers of non-Ivey cases such as Harvard, as well as tracks and reports on sales data.

In collaboration with Toronto-based design firm Delvinia, a leader in digital strategy and customer experience, Affinity delivered a custom solution that solves the common retail needs of product and SKU management and e-commerce transactions related to selling cases on line, and that also supports a complex back-office. The system integrates with Great Plains accounting systems, interfaces to third party print shops for fulfillment, loads usage data from third party distributors, integrates with a content management system (Cascade), and integrates to a digital rights management application (Protected PDF by Vitrium Systems). The result is an automated, streamlined, efficient, and accurate system that users have embraced, and that well positions Ivey Publishing for future growth as their business moves online.