Introducing BPM to the Broadcast sector

June 01, 2012. 17:48:01 en Industry Trends por Noemi Casas

As we saw in NAB 2012, there are more companies concerned about Business Process Managament (BPM) in Media/Broadcast, and a few providers are starting to offer their own solution packs.

What does BPM mean?

Business Process Management does not have a dictionary definition, as is still quite a new concept. In a nut-shell it’s a method to optimize processes in an organization, seeking efficiency, innovation, flexibility and integration with technology.

Traditionally, IT-systems have always welcome and supported business processes but nowadays a BPM is essential as well for Broadcasting and Media, as the sector is evolving with the changes of the IT-landscapes.

How does a BPM help to improve efficiency in Broadcast?

BPM is a must to optimize the investments and productivity of production and end-to-end broadcasting solutions. It helps with:

- Optimizing the organization

- Making business processes visible and traceable

- Sincronizing business rules with the operational processes

- Continuous improvement of processes

In broadcast, BPM goes in hand with the workflows, as it helps to simplify and redesign workflows according to business requirements. Specifically a BPM can design workflows with parametric metadata in order to customize the business rules and adapt to each customer’s workflows regarding content transfer, quality control, notifications, transcoding, cataloguing, etc. In this way, BPM converts any media process in an “alive” solution, easy to adapt to the business changes and new requirements of the system.

All TV channel processes can be controled with BPM

Tracking all the system processes should be simple, centralized and customizable for each user’s category. A technical manager can supervise all the company’s workflows, previewing, detecting and fixing any problem in a very efficient manner.

Finally, the BPM should connect to all the IT applications and solutions of the company (like Ingest-QC, MAM-Archive, News, Transcoding, Automation or Traffic). Additionally the BPM and the IT applications should use a kind of ‘Media Bus’ or similar to manage all the content processes. But this Media Bus is a different story for another post…

Next chapter: Introducing BPM to the Broadcast sector: Media Bus