How Reimagined Media Supply Chains Deliver a Competitive Advantage
If you feel like economic and business pressures are converging and your team is struggling to adapt, you aren’t alone. As layoffs, restructurings, and mergers have become regular occurrences, operational teams are expected to deliver more titles and assets to an increasing number of destinations. Reliant on leaner teams and fewer resources, they must do more with less — all while maintaining the responsiveness and accuracy to fulfill unanticipated business deals quickly.
The question then arises: How can media organizations maintain their output, or even increase it, while dealing with constrained resources? The answer lies in rethinking workflows, adopting automation, and leveraging the elasticity of cloud-enabled media supply chains.
Driving Productivity Through Cloud, AI, and Automation
Operational teams within the modern media organization face the dual challenge of managing growing workloads and addressing unexpected surges in demand. With existing personnel, they must be able to deliver against tight deadlines when a new licensing deal lands. Achieving this degree of productivity can be difficult when operational inefficiencies have built up over time. Traditional workflows, often rife with redundant processes and fragmented data, prevent teams from keeping pace with modern demands. So, if they are to do more with less, organizations must embrace a strategic shift in how they approach their supply chains.
Elastic Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud-based media supply chains, such as those managed through the SDVI Rally media supply chain management platform, support a smarter approach. By moving workflows to the cloud, organizations realize unprecedented agility in scaling media processing activity. At the same time, they eliminate the overhead associated with maintaining on-site infrastructure. Rather than spend time on tasks such as managing server patches or antivirus updates, technical staff can focus on higher-value activities. With data consolidated in a centralized repository, staff across the organization can readily access data from a single source of truth.
AI/ML Integration
Integrated in the media supply chain, advances in AI and machine learning (ML) have transformed tasks such as transcription and translation. As these tools become more accurate, they further reduce the need for manual review, enabling teams to process more content in less time. In addition to accelerating key workflows across the media supply chain, AI/ML-driven tools also reduce errors, ensuring higher-quality outputs.
Automation and Orchestration
Often building on the benefits of AI/ML-driven tools, automation enables exception-based workflows, where operators only step in when necessary. By minimizing manual intervention, this model allows teams to handle significantly larger content throughput. One Rally user, Hearst Networks, has done just that, reducing the touchpoints in its ingest and QC workflows from 16 to 4, a transformation that has enabled team members to focus on strategic tasks rather than routine ones.
Rethinking the Supply Chain
Re-engineering traditional media workflows may start with a commitment to cloud, but redesigning processes to improve responsiveness and productivity can be an even more extensive undertaking. Organizations often are tempted to “pave the cow paths,” layering new technology onto inefficient workflows rather than addressing the underlying issues that compromise agility. The Rally platform helps organizations avoid this pitfall.
By eliminating unnecessary steps and automating repetitive tasks, a media organization can double its operational capacity. That may involve gathering and leveraging metadata across the supply chain to streamline a series of processing steps. Or using AI to automatically detect and identify segment breaks so that operators can focus on identifying optimal advertising breaks. The result is a media supply chain that operates at peak efficiency, with teams focused on higher value activities rather than being bogged down by routine tasks.
This transformation allows the organization to leverage the elasticity of cloud-enabled workflows. Because workflows are automated and scalable, operations teams can respond to unexpected demands without being overwhelmed. This flexibility transforms their stance from reactive to proactive, enabling the organization to say “yes” to new opportunities and meet delivery deadlines with confidence. They can, for example, bring an old series out of the archives and modernize it for a new distribution deal, or fulfill the sale of a content catalog to a new region.
The Future of Leaner Media Operations
Achieving more with less isn’t just a survival tactic for modern media organizations; it’s a competitive advantage. By adopting cloud-enabled media supply chains with a platform that simplifies automation and orchestration, media organizations can streamline operations, reduce costs, and scale their capabilities. Whether handling unplanned workload increases or reducing touchpoints throughout regular operations, an organization that implements the right tools and workflows can empower its teams to adapt and thrive.
This type of transformation demands a willingness to step back, reevaluate, and rebuild workflows from the ground up. But in today’s economic environment and competitive landscape, the resulting efficiency and agility can make all the difference in navigating critical challenges and seizing valuable business opportunities.
Need to do more with less? Want to talk about out how to get your media supply chain where you need it to be? Contact us to start the conversation.
