Projects Shueisya – Vareal Vietnam

PROJECT

SHUEISYA PROJECT

Shueisha Co., Ltd. Supported the development of the personalized picture book "JibunEHON"

Company Introduction

Address : 2-3-34 Nishishinchi, Oita City, Oita Prefecture, 870-0901

Established : December 1984 (Showa 59)

Business : Printing business for products requiring binding and commercial printed materials

System Overview

JibunEHON: https://jibun-ehon.com/

JibunEHON is a service that allows you to freely customize the main character of your picture book and easily create a one-of-a-kind personalized picture book.

It has been well-received by many users as a gift for their own children or the children of their friends.

Customizable areas

You can change the main character’s name and appearance.
The background changes depending on the month your child was born
You can include a photo of your child
You can add a message to your child at the end of the book.
Gift wrapping available

Our support

Background of the request

This service was born from the desire to launch a service that could provide an integrated service for picture books, from customization to sales, on the “JibunEHON” platform by linking an external InDesign server with a web server.
To keep development costs as low as possible, the client considered offshore development, and in selecting a vendor, they prioritized whether the vendor had extensive experience in offshore development and whether they could handle development in collaboration with the company that operates the InDesign server.
While considering multiple development vendors, they chose us because we have a wholly owned subsidiary in Vietnam, have extensive experience and knowledge in offshore development, and are accustomed to managing multiple vendors.

Issues and Initiatives

Our company provided consistent support for this project, from requirements definition to development and testing. One development challenge was that the InDesign server, an Israeli server with limited experience in Japan, was interoperating poorly with the app, hindering development. To smoothly resolve this issue, we established a system that allowed our development team to work directly with the operating company’s development team, and we resolved the issue through close communication about the server’s functions and specifications.

Another issue was the time it took to display the preview screen of a picture book customized by a user. Initially, the InDesign server generated and displayed the customized picture book on the screen, but we proposed a method to edit only the customized parts of the app and display the preview screen without going through the InDesign server. This method significantly reduced the display time.

Development process

The project was implemented by our wholly owned subsidiary in Vietnam, with Japanese project managers and system engineers acting as the liaison. The development period involved 11 man-months of resources, including designers.

The main AWS services used in JibunEHON and how they were used

JibunEHON’s infrastructure design utilizes core AWS services. By combining AWS services, JibunEHON has built a scalable and highly available infrastructure, improving the user experience.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Amazon EC2 is a computing service that provides virtual servers. JibunEHON uses it to provide the computing resources necessary to run applications and to execute application and backend processing.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)

Amazon RDS is a fully managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases. JibunEHON uses it for application data storage and database management.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS (Domain Name System) web service that JibunEHON uses to manage domain names and route traffic.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Amazon S3 is an object storage service used to store, back up, and distribute data. At JibunEHON, we use it to host and back up static files, as well as to store user files.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that enables fast and secure content delivery. JibunEHON uses it to accelerate the delivery of static and dynamic content, improving the user experience.

Deliveries and future support plans

Since the release of JibunEHON, it has been used by many users.
We are currently receiving requests for operation and maintenance, and are improving functions according to client requests.