WHATS’ON HIVE: A lean content supply chain to actively drive content ROI & lifetime value of content

By Shirish Nadkarni

Since the 1990s, “lean” has been an important concept in the world of manufacturing. From there, it percolates into other fields such as Supply Chain Management (SCM). Mediagenix, which ranks among the top media tech vendors in the international media industry, has just set a new standard for a lean content supply chain, adding a new dimension to its Media Business Management Platform WHATS’ON. 

“What does it mean for a supply chain to be lean? What comes with the continuous effort to reduce waste?” is a rhetorical question posed by Mandyam M. Srinivasan (better known simply as ‘Srini’), author of the book, Streamlined: 14 Principles for Building and Managing the Lean Supply Chain, and a consultant to numerous organisations including IBM, Sony, Allied-Honeywell, Boeing, Cutler-Hammer, Delta Airlines, and the United States Air Force.

“Given the complexity and multi-dimensional aspect of SCM, and the trade-offs that are made every step of the way to cope with the multiple options related to a supply chain network, Lean SCM sounds more like an unreachable Utopia than anything else. However, this perspective can be key to restructuring supply chains in a more efficient and competitive way – albeit with some noticeable twists compared to the original Lean Manufacturing vision.”

A lean supply chain defines how a well-designed supply chain should operate, delivering products quickly to the end-customer, with minimum waste. A lean supply chain is a great enabler for any organisation that strives to become more lean and efficient. 

Organisations within a lean supply chain are able to leverage their own lean journey more easily, delivering better customer value by responding more efficiently, quickly, and predictably to customer needs. That, in turn, facilitates the operation of the lean supply chain, creating a virtuous cycle that ultimately translates to superior financial performance for these organisations.

Mediagenix has produced a lean content supply chain that connects strategic, planning and execution workflows around one source-of-truth by leveraging a series of new WHATS’ON HIVE products. The company had planned to showcase it at IBC 2021. However, it has had to be content with a more low-key rollout of the platform as the in-person IBC trade show succumbed to the Covid pandemic.

“Our `FFWD to Data Value’ programme connects data assets across the content supply chain to fast-track advanced BI and AI capabilities that visualise and optimise content ROI,” says Ivan Verbesselt, Mediagenix’s Chief Product & Marketing Officer.

“Media networks can improve business and operational efficiency by 20% to 80% with a lean content supply chain. Such efficiency gains are predicated on collaborative workflows spanning the entire content supply chain at strategic, planning and execution levels and revolving around three core principles: one source-of-truth, touchless operations, and actionable content intelligence.” 

In the MBM (Media Business Management) platform WHATS’ON, unified workflows around content, rights and planning make for a lean end-to-end content supply chain that reduces both operational costs and hidden supply chain waste, while maximising Content ROI. 

Verbesselt adds, “Our new WHATS’ON products and workflows drive business performance on four levels: multiplatform operational efficiency, cross-functional collaboration, audience engagement and content monetisation.

“With the enhanced WHATS’ON collaborative workflows, all departments work in perfect sync as real-time data is put at the centre of the ecosystem, driving operations and decisions around a single source-of-truth.

“WHATS’ON thus elegantly connects the strategic, planning and execution workflows to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone processes, reduce waiting times and processing complexity, and enable management-by-exception.”

Leveraging three decades of continuous development, WHATS’ON has earned a reputation for functional depth and open architecture, fostering smooth integration into any media ecosystem. The new WHATS’ON HIVE platform now seamlessly expands the core principles of WHATS’ON in the cloud by streamlining all workflows even more smoothly into one shared and controlled process governed by continuous deployment, helping media companies to be even more agile in view of increasing content costs and continuously shifting viewer demands. 

New WHATS’ON HIVE products include: 

• Content Cockpit, visualising content ROI by providing real-time intelligence on content performance and audience engagement.
• Strategic Planning, facilitating the long-term allocation of content across platforms to match supply and demand. 

• Content Curation, tuning on-demand prominence and discoverability to drive audience engagement and monetisation. 
• Metadata portal, facilitating collaborative enrichment and leveraging automated ingestion from internet platforms. 
• ARTIST, the suite of augmented intelligence solutions facilitating ratings-optimised automated scheduling. 
• Integrated online marketplace, leveraging the agility of online marketplaces to sell and acquire content.

Mediagenix has simultaneously launched two solutions that will support media companies to avoid data fragmentation and to boost the time-to-value of data investments – Mediagenix Prism, a Data-Platform-as-a-service that enriches data assets from WHATS’ON with a third party, in-house and open data sources; and  Mediagenix Spectrum, a service fast-tracking a Proof-of-Value for BI and AI applications that visualise and optimise content ROI.

“A lean content supply chain lays the foundation to actively drive content ROI and lifetime value of content,” says Verbesselt. “WHATS’ON enables this through agile windowing and publishing across multiple platforms as well as smart content curation to drive engagement and discoverability.

“With WHATS’ON HIVE, we have taken this agility a big step further.”

Question: Can one source-of-truth underpinned by widespread collaborative content supply chain workflows improve business and operational efficiency by up to 80%?

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