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Mediaset Group
©2009 ScheduALL
Abstract
Commercial broadcasters and post-production facilities worldwide are
feeling the pinch of today’s challenging economic climate, as well as the
pressure of increasing competition in providing media to consumers.
These media companies understand that continued profitability depends
on their ability to do more with less, and this means maximizing the
efficiency of workflows, improving the management of personnel,
establishing beneficial vendor relationships, increasing productivity and
controlling costs – all of which are elemental to realizing a consistent
return on investment (ROI) throughout the business. Italy’s Mediaset
serves as an excellent example of how a company can maximize its ROI
through comprehensive resource management.
Introduction
The Mediaset Group has the distinction of being Italy’s first commercial
broadcaster, and since its founding, the group also has earned
recognition as one of Europe’s foremost media companies. The group’s
parent company, Mediaset S.p.A, is a fully integrated media enterprise
with operations that include three national television channels (Canale 5,
Italia 1, and Retequattro), Italy’s largest advertising company, television
production facilities, Italy’s largest television rights library, and a wholly
owned national signal distribution business.
Videotime, the Mediaset subsidiary that manages the productions
of TV programs for the three networks, operates Mediaset’s studios
and equipment and provides specialized technical personnel for live
broadcast, news, variety and game shows, and some of the dramas
produced by the company. Videotime has become the leader in
Italian TV production, and the company works with the most advanced
technologies available to guarantee the highest level of quality in its
TV productions. In seeking to consolidate management of resources
and streamline operations for multiple locations companywide,
Mediaset extended implementation of ScheduALL’s enterprise resource
management (ERM) software across all of its operations.
Situation
Mediaset first began using ScheduALL software within its Elettronica
Industriale division to manage contribution transmissions and satellite
feeds across its network, which covers all of Italy. The company’s
production division, however, remained reliant on custom software
tailored only for its studios, edit suites and personnel. For nearly a
decade, Videotime struggled with a solution that failed to address all of
the division’s resources or provide for effective planning in tandem with
Elettronica Industriale. Thus, while the two Mediaset divisions shared
clients and internal resources under the umbrella of the group’s RTI
subsidiary, the disconnect between their scheduling and management
capabilities forced the group to maintain multiple databases, which
prevented implementation of fluid workflows while also creating costly
redundancies in personnel and in entering and updating project and
resource information.
Because the two resource management solutions used by Elettronica
Industriale and Videotime spoke different “languages” and featured
separate, proprietary interfaces, they were incompatible. As a result,
users could not share data across the systems, nor could they examine
and analyze costs and projects across production and distribution
operations. To realize vastly improved efficiencies enterprise-wide,
Mediaset made the decision to transition its Videotime division and
full complement of newsgathering and production resources onto
ScheduALL software for comprehensive project visibility.
Analysis
Among Mediaset’s key strategic aims as a business is to carve out
a position of strength in the content market, and to do so without
compromising its economic stability, depriving its core business of
resources, or entering into risky business relationships. The ability to
collaborate internally and to provide visibility into projects and business
processes across Elettronica Industriale and Videotime is essential to
this goal.
Elettronica Industriale owns the network that supports distribution of
Mediaset Group signals, and Videotime guarantees the technological
maintenance and development of the production infrastructure, including
studios, post-production and graphics units, and mobile studios. As
these divisions work cooperatively to bring broadcasts to television
viewers, Mediaset’s commitment to ScheduALL provides numerous
opportunities for streamlining both personnel and equipment management,
consolidating vital business and project data, and leveraging all resources
optimally from one end of the workflow to the other.
“The Mediaset Group has the expertise and organizational structure to
select projects and develop the production of TV movies, miniseries,
and popular TV drama series, and ScheduALL software provides
Videotime with a comprehensive platform for efficient management of
these productions, which are central to our broadcast schedules,” says
Marco Bianchi, Mediaset studio planner responsible for supervising
the ScheduALL system. “We knew that by extending our scheduling
capabilities across all of the technical and personnel resources within
both Videotime and Elettronica Industriale, we’d gain significant cost and
productivity benefits through better-defined end-to-end processes and
consolidated production and resource planning, all of which bring much
greater efficiency to our overall operations.”
Solution
Mediaset brought its Videotime division onto the ScheduALL ERM
platform, consolidating project, personnel, vendor, equipment, and facilities
data within a single database accessible to both Elettronica Industriale and
Videotime staff via a single interface. The software simplifies real-time
scheduling of resources, reduces redundancy, and improves accuracy in
planning and executing individual projects. By facilitating communications
among managers and personnel throughout the operation, the software
supports a considerably more collaborative approach to planning and
completing production and distribution work. As this work is performed,
ScheduALL links cost data to each project from inception through
distribution to enable focused cost analysis and control.
“Working with ScheduALL across different divisions of the group
allows us to speak a common language. In a sense, we are now
working with the same tools and leveraging shared data more
effectively in planning and managing our resource use,” says
Bianchi. “Whereas previous solutions were limited in their ability
to address all of our resources and needs, the ScheduALL software
enables us to manage every part of operations. The ability to
consolidate planning and management within a single application
has enabled us to share personnel and technical resources more
efficiently across the company while reducing the burden on IT and
scheduling staff.”
Benefits
As a unified scheduling platform for Mediaset’s production and
distribution divisions, ScheduALL software offers intuitive interfaces
tailored to the needs of different user sets. Project information is
entered into the software only once and thereafter is carried through all
operations, whether the project requires a quick turnaround or stretches
over numerous episodes. Reliance on a single server and database
minimizes the workload and management time required of the company’s
IT staff, while also eliminating redundant data entry, reducing valuable
time wasted, lowering the potential for input error, and streamlining
overall processes company-wide.
Integration of planning and service requests across divisions facilitates
tighter collaboration and allows for comprehensive reporting and
analysis with respect to facility performance and efficiency. Access
to current scheduling information gives production, technical and
creative staff a clear picture of project workflows and timelines, in turn
enabling individual staff members to manage their own time and activities
accordingly. With a dramatically improved view into both personnel
and resource use and availability, managers can be more effective in
optimizing the deployment and value of those resources.
In extending its ScheduALL use to include management of Videotime
studios, ENG equipment, editing suites, and personnel, Mediaset also has
been able to track the costs and progress of each production project more
closely and more completely. The software supports real-time scheduling
of resources, preventing users from double-booking and warning them
when potential conflicts arise. At any point in the life of a work order,
project managers and executives use ScheduALL’s real-time data to keep
an eye on the status of any project. ScheduALL allows them to checking
budgeted costs against real costs and gain insight into the relationship of
costs to returns, whether internally in a particular project area or externally
in working with a particular vendor. The significance of this capability
helps keep critical margins in perspective and enables better business
decisions by all.
The import of data from Mediaset’s SAP system makes information about
vendors, resource quantities, and prices readily available in ScheduALL
without requiring users to work with the company’s more complex financial
software system. As a result of ScheduALL’s high interoperability with
other leading business and media solutions, Mediaset managers can
easily and at any time, use the software to assess how well the project
is meeting the company’s quotes and financial goals. A custom interface
between ScheduALL and SAP also supports the export of project and cost
details into SAP, driving faster, more accurate billing and enabling more
in-depth financial analysis and reporting.
With improved tools for enterprise-wide resource and vendor planning
at their fingertips, Mediaset managers are positioned to maintain or
increase the company’s productivity while establishing better cost
controls, lowering the overall cost of doing business, accelerating project
completion, and increasing its ROI.
Summary
Maximizing efficiencies and streamlining operations are now, more
than ever, a top priority within the broadcast and production industries.
ScheduALL’s robust solutions provide media companies of all sizes with
the comprehensive planning and management tools needed to make this
goal a reality. In addressing all elements of the business and integrating
smoothly with Mediaset’s existing systems, ScheduALL supports more
collaborative workflows across the company and improves the visibility
of project costs, thus enabling the company to realize a substantially
improved ROI and greater profitability from its production work.
For more information contact ScheduALL:
US: +1.954.334.5406
sales@scheduall.com
UK: +44 (0) 20 7636 0707
eurosales@scheduall.com