By Guest Blogger, Peter Hissey, Systems Architect, ScheduALL

I have often been asked why resources in ScheduALL sometimes don’t match the physical devices in the Network Management System. Or why ScheduALL does not auto-discover the devices.

We have to go back to understanding a little about each system’s purpose and fit within the larger business function. Who the users are that interact with ScheduALL and what they are trying to do all relate to how the information (resources) should be displayed to them and held within ScheduALL.

You must understand that the ScheduALL configuration aims to make the bookings process as simple as possible while at the same time managing enough information to be able to conflict check and perform other administrative functions like financial reporting.

An abstracted example would be - camera kits that get booked out on ENG jobs. A camera kit may be made up of several components such as a camera, tripod, battery, etc. From a scheduler’s point of view, they may not need to know what goes into a kit, just that they have 4 available kits to book, hence the abstracted nature of a camera kit.

In a similar way, in an automated bookings/control environment where video circuits are being booked, the scheduler cares about availability of devices. If there are two devices that are always booked together, there’s little reason to create both as individual resources in ScheduALL but rather a single resource would be a more natural/efficient approach.

This may be over simplifying the process of deciding how many resources to create, as in reality there are other factors such as pricing, costs, asset management needs, etc. The point I’m making is that ScheduALL commonly has an abstracted and simplified view of the resources that it’s managing/booking in order to make the scheduler’s job a little easier.

Consumers want the choice of viewing content tailored to them – exactly what, how often and delivered via multiple platforms.  The growing requirements to deliver consumer specific content has increased exponentially while the challenging economic conditions and shrinking budgets demand that more projects be executed more efficiently, timely and with fewer people.  Technologies today must provide greater visibility on the event planning as well as and deep forensics proactively for every project – what price, what quality and how quickly the content can be distributed and monetized.

ScheduALL is making industry advances for pre planning, automated scheduling and reporting tools that significantly impact, accelerate content capture and its reshaping to meet growing consumer needs. Additionally, these tools when combined with interoperability and collaborative consumption models pose a competitive advantage to maximize productivity and profitability over linear based workflows.

By Guest Blogger, Linda DiLorenzo, Sr. Implementation Manager, ScheduALL

The Voice of America (VOA) is a multimedia broadcaster funded by the U.S. Government, broadcasting insightful and comprehensive news to an international audience. It started in radio news for people living in closed and war-torn societies and it has grown into a multimedia broadcast service with 1500 hours of weekly programing broadcasted in 43 languages to an audience of 123 million. VOA reaches people on mobile devices, televisions, radios and social media. ScheduALL plays a key role in delivering these broadcasts.

As VOA has expanded, their Radio and TV divisions started experiencing inefficient workflows to manage transmissions, unreliable reporting information on disparate systems, and redundancy in having to manually enter information into multiple systems.

As a direct result of the ScheduLINK system from ScheduALL, complimented with ScheduALL’s Chorus™ interoperability solution, VOA is now dynamically interacting with their third party applications such as Harris Automation, Lysis, CompuSat, and Dalet systems for transmission based resource allocation management. This centrally controlled environment created by ScheduALL also supports the scheduling of personnel, allowing both VOA’s Radio and TV divisions to efficiently work together and share resources for broadcast.

By Joel Ledlow, CEO, ScheduALL

IBC2012 was another terrific show for ScheduALL. I am uncertain if the show had more or fewer attendees this year but I believe it to be one of the better IBC’s I have attended. So many innovations and the ability to connect with so many of our customers at one show is truly exciting. The wow factors were definitely the feedback you shared on our new UX and reporting tools due out in December. This and our inclusion in the Sky News Arabia project “Innovation Award for Content Management” – it was truly inspiring  to see ScheduALL being recognized again as best of breed within the community. Thank you Sky!

Thanks again to so many of you who stopped by. For those unable to attend I have asked our marketing team to showcase a little of that magical experience later this week in a post-show webinar – I hope you can make it. Register here

Keep your eyes open for the innovations ahead as ScheduALL builds on its robust business logic and accelerates interoperability, collaboration and resource management around the world!

ScheduALL Booth at IBC2012

]]> http://www.scheduallblog.com/another-terrific-show-for-scheduall/feed/ 0 http://www.scheduallblog.com/innovation-recognized-at-ibc2012/ http://www.scheduallblog.com/innovation-recognized-at-ibc2012/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:52:22 +0000 Steve Zucker http://www.scheduallblog.com/?p=464

You might already know that Sky News Arabia (SNA) received an IBC2012 Innovation Award nod for the most innovative use of technology in content management. What you might not know is SNA chose ScheduALL’s workflow management software for their new facility taking interoperability to unprecedented levels.

The Abu Dhabi location is one of the largest and most advanced News Centers in the Middle East and we are honored to be included in the nomination as a technical partner.

Bevan Gibson, SNA Technical Launch Director boasted about the capabilities of our software to create next generation automation allowing them to maximize effectiveness of their resources across their new facility.

Peter Hissey on stage at IBC2012

Because of our unique participation within the SNA facility, we were also asked to join them on stage during a presentation at IBC. Systems Architect, Peter Hissey of our EMEA team participated in presenting ScheduALL’s role in the project.

If you want to know more, read our Sky News Arabia case study here.

By Guest Blogger Denis Ducasse, Implementation Manager – EMEA

Denis with his Broadcast Medal and certificate from The Olympics

Forget about Spiderman and Prometheus: this summer’s real Blockbuster – and what everybody’s talking about – has to be the London 2012 Olympics. NBC won the rights for the Olympics until 2020. Since Athens in 2004, they rely on ScheduALL to schedule all their feeds and equipment. And since both NBC and ScheduALL believe in innovation, the partnership had to be pushed further: NBC’s New Media department used the interoperability features offered by Chorus to interface their MAM and Streaming platforms with ScheduALL. This has opened new horizons to the Broadcaster: over 10000 clips were shared with both sides of the Pond (3000 miles apart) faster than real time for immediate production use across all divisions, and for Live streaming on the internet, making the London 2012 Olympics the largest digital event in history.

Being part of this adventure and working within the Broadcast Operations Centre was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Joining the highly regarded Olympics team of NBC was a real privilege. But having the team recognising ScheduALL as a partner and my work as a piece of the puzzle was the real reward. Mission accomplished! The Broadcast Medal that we received reflects the hard work and commitment of everyone on the team that made these Games possible.

July 2012 issue of Boadcast Engineering

ScheduALL’s vice president of product management, Joel Nirenberg was tapped to write an article for the “UK Summer of Sports” issue of Broadcast Engineering, on the topic of managing the complexities of multi-day sports events.

The arrival of this article comes on the heels of the recent announcement that for the fifth straight Olympic Games, ScheduALL has been chosen to provide comprehensive scheduling and operational management software systems to NBCUniversal during its coverage of the 2012 London Olympics

Enterprise Resource Management software facilitates the production of multi-day sports events. Full article

Read the press release

Read the case study

I can’t describe the excitement within the ScheduALL team as we look forward to holding more of our ongoing User Group meetings this week. We’ll be collaborating with the customers who share our passion for innovation this coming Tuesday, July 10 in New York, and then later in the week in Toronto on Thursday, July 12.

That’s why we’re so excited: it’s a simple fact that our best ideas come from our customers.

We’ve released a battalion of brand new products over the past couple of years: Circuit Selection, ERMa, AVvA, Notification Manager, Weave, Hitch, Chorus, Personnel Utilization Manager … the list is almost endless. All of these products—along with the enhanced functionality we’ve provided in our existing products—share one thing in common:  they all germinated in ScheduALL User Group meetings or Executive Advisory Board meetings.

Make no mistake—we’re proud to have a lot of very smart people on the ScheduALL team, and we’re adding more of them all the time. But no one knows better than our own customers what they really need—not only to survive, but to thrive and expand in a world of increased project complexity, globalization and cost constraints. Our mission at ScheduALL is to find out what our customers will need before they need it, and deliver to them proactive, not reactive solutions.

And so, we don’t just listen to them, we go out of our way to listen. Instead of waiting for our customers to call or e-mail us, we get out on the road and create the opportunities for them to tell us what they need, in an environment where all of us can bounce ideas together and learn from each other, in a vibrant, collaborative community of ScheduALL users.

We leave these meetings energized with new ideas that will allow us to make our customers far better at doing what they do—faster, cheaper and more effectively. We’re eager to go back and build new solutions to address our industry’s ever-changing challenges. And then, we can’t wait to go back on the road again to share with our customers what we’re delivering for them, give a glimpse of we have in the works (like our exciting new User Interface / User Experience initiative!)—and to get the next “genius” ideas all over again!

Click here to register for any of our upcoming 2012 User Group meetings across the globe. If you’d like to join us this week in either New York or Toronto, please e-mail us as soon as possible at events@scheduall.com. Space is extremely limited!

A Recent Customer Presentation: ScheduALL Users Group in London, England

It’s not exactly a smooth horizontal transition for a marketing professional to enter the computer software industry, when he is coming from the marketing side of Lifetime Television’s morning show. Yet the connection was there: I was the marketing manager for a television show (which coincidently uses ScheduALL), and of course ScheduALL software manages all elements of the media, broadcast and transmission industries.

But software? ‘Challenge’ was the word that came to mind at first, but I was up for it because it was enveloped in excitement.  Here’s why:  As a marketing professional, there is nothing more desirable than working for a brand that has a sterling reputation and is considered an industry leader — not just by their own categorization, but the industry’s.  The numbers that support this claim speak for themselves, but the people in the industry speak even louder and after my first NAB show in 2012, my optimistic assumption of the ScheduALL brand name was confirmed.

ScheduALL has been the global leader for ERM software for the media and broadcast industries since 1989, with a customer satisfaction rate in 2011, averaging 93%. Not only does this level of satisfaction help to reserve the position of ‘industry global leader,’ but so do the numbers.  Over 1,200 clients in 53 countries are using software that seamlessly touches and connects everything from staff scheduling to OU transmission.

The seemingly daunting task that I faced just two months ago—adjusting to the ERM software industry—has quickly shifted to a career that is exciting, inspiring and anything but routine.  There is so much innovation in this software segment over the last few years: the shift to mobile platforms, the transition to file-based workflows with resources utilized across the globe, migration to cloud based systems, etc.  ScheduALL is leading the industry down these roads and therefor the challenge for me continues — no longer from the learning curve of the industry, but because of the innovation that ScheduALL applies to its products.  It’s not the industry progression that adds to my new challenges in this role; it’s the innovation that transpires in this very office in sunny South Florida.

By Guest Blogger Kara Jenkins, Regional Sales Engineer

When I was a child, my folks would pile all of us into our station wagon and take us for a drive. Occasionally, there was a destination in mind like a historic battlefield or museum, but sometimes there was no plan at all. It didn’t really matter where we went or when we got there—the adventure (and fun) was in not knowing, in the exploration of the unknown (even if at times it felt like we were driving around in circles and retracing our steps).

I still love a good adventure—but when I’m at work, I can’t imagine anything more frustrating than driving around in circles.  Forget having to re-entering the same data over and over again into multiple systems just to complete a simple task, just give me the shortest distance between two points—efficient, clean, streamlined processes that yield maximum results. If you’ve ever been responsible for the bottom-line at your organization, you know exactly what I mean. After all, greater efficiency usually equals greater productivity, which in turn leads to greater profitability and success.

So, what’s the shortest, most direct route to this destination of efficiency and productivity?

These days, organizations are looking to cut costs by eliminating superfluous or redundant software products and finding ways to automate processes. The big buzzword is “interoperability”—the idea that connecting disparate systems will reduce the effort involved and mitigate risk of user error, while simultaneously expediting workflows through automation. To achieve this in the past, a lot of time and money was often spent on custom interfaces and programmers, but let’s face it—not every company has the budget or resources to go through a lengthy development cycle for hard-coded interfaces.

Besides, what happens if you find something else that better meet your needs down the road? Do you really want to re-build that interface every time you change Asset Management or Accounting system? Of course you don’t—in a rapidly changing industry, flexibility is a key component to any interoperability and automation strategy.

A simple solution begins with an objective analysis of your current processes and business drivers—a process with which our team at ScheduALL can assist you. Remember, it’s worth the investment to get this done correctly the first time.

But most important, you need to seek out a solution that makes the best sense for your organization. That’s why we’re so keen on our ScheduALL Chorus™ interoperability solution and the positive impact it’s had so far for our clients using it. It provides the flexibility and compatibility in a 21^st-century interoperability solution—one that scales with your requirements and can easily be modified should your needs change in the future.

To learn more about this and other ScheduALL solutions, please visit us at our NAB 2012 booth or contact us at events@scheduall.com to discuss further.