Sky has selected the Polaris operational management software platform from TMT Insight as it consolidates all functions related to film and TV content across its UK, Germany, and Italy operations.
The move is part of a roll-out that is ultimately planned to include other Sky content categories.
Moving to Polaris will give the broadcaster more efficient order and task management, increased collaboration among matrixed teams, enhanced visibility into the entire content supply chain, and decreased lifecycle fulfillment times, said TMT Insights.
Polaris is designed to deliver “a single pane of glass” view into every aspect of Sky’s content supply chain from ingest to final delivery. The platform integrates directly into existing third party and proprietary toolsets to give Sky an intuitive and graphical representation of the data across its entire supply chain, allowing multiple teams to simultaneously visualise and manage projects at any stage without needing to interpret engineering information from bespoke subsystems, added TMT.
“Over the last several years, we have made a concerted effort to unify our multiple supply chains across companies,” said Dave Travis, group director of content, broadcast and platforms at Sky.
“With each having varying degrees of functionality spanning numerous technology products, this led to challenges around communication, duplication of efforts, disjointed workflows, and operational complexities. There was a clear need to remove those inefficiencies, improve control over our global supply chain, and accelerate our ability to efficiently produce and distribute content anywhere.”
Sky intends to use every component of the Polaris platform, including task management, order management, inventory and workflow visibility, and file management.
“Most systems are designed for use by engineers and speak in the nomenclature of assets and files instead of orders and tasks,” said Andy Shenkler, CEO and co-founder, TMT Insights. “That makes effective supply chain management at scale nearly impossible when you have 10,000 projects running through a system at one time and hundreds of users with different skill sets. We’ve flipped the old model on its head and designed a system that tells the user whether or not they have everything they need, instead of them having to go find it themselves.”
