BPM enhances broadcast workflows

Deploying a Business Process Manager (BPM) solution can help streamline workflows and, in turn, increase production speed, reduce operational costs, preserve quality and improve the utilisation of available resources, says Rafael Dubois of Tedial

Many broadcasters are implementing file-based systems in their facilities and yet, many continue to organise working practices according to the inherent limitations associated with old tape-based technology. Going tapeless is not the ultimate goal but rather the key that opens the possibilities to significantly improving productivity by organising the way that people work in a logical and efficient manner.

In today’s modern broadcast facility, new Media Asset Management (MAM) technology should be built on layered logic using three core components — HSM for the archive, the MAM itself and an EBS (Enterprise Service Bus) especially designed for the intricacies of the broadcast industry, providing a middleware platform that allows multiple heterogeneous systems to integrate and communicate among themselves.

These three layers provide a fully functional tapeless system that can then be used as a base for implementing a Business Process Manager (BPM) solution to organise workloads and workflows efficiently, which, in turn, provides an increase of production speed, reduces operational costs, preserves quality and improves the utilisation of available resources. This is what justifies the investment in such a system.

BPM is a platform that has been used in the IT world for many years. It automates and integrates business processes (or levels of automation) and optimises them through real-time business activity monitoring.

In a broadcast environment, business processes involve people, systems and content. Only when they work together in an automated way can maximum productivity and value be realised. In other words, a BPM should ensure that all processes that can be automated are automated. This, in turn, allows operators to focus on the creative process they excel in, rather than wasting time doing mechanical and repetitive tasks.

As the content industry moves rapidly from video-specific recording and storage technologies to a file-based environment, the prospect of bringing all document formats – from text to rich media – into a single workflow can be realised. Achieving this goal requires the development of software products that bring all the processes together under common control.

Specialised workflow software needs to go beyond the simple definition of the steps that are required to complete tasks. By taking a step further, media processing tools such as transcoders, automatic media moving and HSM software can be combined to ensure that operators involved in the workflow automatically have the required clips and segments in the right format before they begin working on their tasks. Thus they don’t waste time searching for or processing media; they are free to solely focus on their creative work.

This enables workflows to truly increase productivity, reducing operator time and freeing staff to carry out other activities. BPM enables the standardisation and automation of a broadcaster’s production workflows according to its quality standards, providing a complete business workflow manager fully integrated with existing multimedia information systems.

Any workflow involving media assets can be defined, executed and monitored by the BPM system. Each individual step of the productive process is systematised and automated whenever possible, and the usage of available resources and workloads are optimised accordingly. Some MAM providers offer prefabricated workflows that can be customised within limited parameters or by writing new code, whereas a well-designed BPM provides the tools to implement dozens or hundreds of workflows, each and every one designed from scratch around the customer’s requirements.

The BPM system ensures that operators interact in a coordinated way by producing work orders based on the user’s profile, specific responsibilities and by taking into account the global priorities, resources available and deadlines of the entire production chain. The system is designed to be tightly integrated with traffic in a bi-directional way. Traffic systems can drive the BPM so that most workflows and their associated work orders are launched and executed automatically. It operates as a global database, which queries and updates all third-party databases involved in the workflows ensuring that the information and metadata is consistent throughout the entire system.

From the onset, the BPM is designed to tackle the specific challenges of broadcast environments and the management of very large video files. It features special functionality such as integrated multimedia player for versioning, creating segments and validating subtitles and generates specific reports covering ingest and QC tasks. The system is designed to integrate using the best possible methods offered by the facility’s third-party systems and their databases.

What further sets this technology apart from other systems is its ability to deliver media to transmission, editing, archiving or any other area of the facility, whilst carrying out all the media processing, so that content arrives in the most efficient way in the correct format for the device that’s going to use it. This is a technology that more end users must ideally research before investing in a MAM solution.

Rafael Dubois is sales and marketing director at Tedial.