Sky is consolidating control and visibility of its global content supply chain system on the Polaris operational management software platform from TMT Insights, the professional services and software development company.
The international broadcaster is migrating all functions related to movie and TV content across its UK, Germany and Italy operations onto the platform, as part of a phased roll-out that is ultimately planned to include other Sky content categories.
Sky’s adoption represents the largest Polaris deployment to date and will deliver significant organizational benefits for the broadcaster including more efficient order and task management, increased collaboration among matrixed teams, enhanced visibility into the entire content supply chain, and decreased lifecycle fulfillment times.
“Over the last several years, we have made a concerted effort to unify our multiple supply chains across companies,” said Dave Travis, Group Director of Content, Broadcast & Platforms at Sky.
“With each having varying degrees of functionality spanning numerous technology products, this led to challenges around communication, duplication of efforts, disjointed workflows, and operational complexities.
“There was a clear need to remove those inefficiencies, improve control over our global supply chain, and accelerate our ability to efficiently produce and distribute content anywhere.”
Polaris is designed to deliver “a single pane of glass” view into every aspect of an organization’s content supply chain from ingest to final delivery.
The platform integrates directly into existing 3rd party & proprietary toolsets to give Sky an intuitive and graphical representation of the data across its entire supply chain, allowing multiple teams to simultaneously visualize and manage projects at any stage without needing to interpret engineering information from bespoke subsystems.
Sky will use every component of the Polaris platform to surface actionable insights: task management, order management, inventory and workflow visibility, and file management.
The system allows threaded communications among multiple teams, giving them access to key information such as order status, delivery requirements, technical specifications, project roles and responsibilities, missing assets, review and approval, error notifications and more – all presented and navigable through an intuitive user experience.
“Most systems are designed for use by engineers and speak in the nomenclature of assets and files instead of orders and tasks,” said Andy Shenkler, CEO and co-founder, TMT Insights.
“That makes effective supply chain management at scale nearly impossible when you have 10,000 projects running through a system at one time and hundreds of users with different skill sets.
“We’ve flipped the old model on its head and designed a system that tells the user whether or not they have everything they need, instead of them having to go find it themselves.”
A Polaris deployment by another media and entertainment organization is yielding similar benefits to those expected by Sky.
The company, with a volume of about 190,000 title package deliveries annually has seen on-time project completion rates rise from an average of 55% to consistently higher than 95% range since implementing Polaris.
“Amazon taught people how to shop, Netflix taught people how to browse, Google taught people how to search,” said Andy Shenkler, CEO and co-founder, TMT Insights.
“We’ve taken those paradigms and applied a layer of context and clarity to all the functions that professionals need to execute in the media and entertainment business.”