Automating operations
Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Tony Lockard
Avoid the workflow to nowhere by creating a new framework for digital content.
The last few years have brought an unprecedented growth in the amount of content most broadcast, post-production, and other content creation and distribution entities have to manage. This trend will only continue in the years ahead as new content distribution channels emerge, and leveraging automated workflows can be a significant tool to successfully meet these challenges.
Unfortunately, budgets and headcount have not kept pace with the ever-growing volume of content in today’s modern media organization. Given the economic pressures forecast for the next few years, budgets and human resources are going to become even more precious. Many companies have already started the transition from physical assets and human-based work processes to file- and automation-based workflows. For others, the pressures of expanding content and flat or shrinking resources may finally provide the tipping point to make the leap to automation-driven work processes in 2009.
In many ways, this transition is inevitable as studies have shown automated file-based workflows can reduce the time or resources required by up to 80 percent for many content manipulation work streams. With this in mind, the goal for many organizations will be to use human talent only for operations that do not lend themselves to automation and for exception handling.
Decide what to automate
Faced with the task of deciding what processes can be automated and which automation and workflow technologies best fit a particular organization, many managers don’t even know how to start the process. As with any large task, it makes sense to break it down into smaller pieces and tackle them one at a time. Deciding what to automate requires analysis of the current processes and then ranking them against the company’s decision criteria. Each company has its own unique set of characteristics, so whatever framework is selected for gathering and designing the workflows should be as flexible and malleable as possible.
Many organizations have to be selective about which work processes are initially targeted for re-engineering and automation. The likely early candidates tend to fall into two broad categories. The first category is work streams that easily lend themselves to automation with little effort and cost, thus providing “quick wins” and building enthusiasm and momentum within the organization for further re-engineering efforts. The second category consists of work streams that may be costly or complex yet provide high return on investment or significant competitive advantages over competitor organizations.
Typically, work streams that don’t fall into these two categories get pushed to later phases in the initiative. Selecting the as-is work processes and designing and scoping the to-be automated workflows can be complex and time-consuming, so resources should initially focus on high value processes.
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