Client
The client has branded its famous logo across multiple platforms, including television, the big screen, theme parks, video games, and their consumer products. Over the past 92 years, the client has acquired a number of businesses, including television industries and movie studios. The client has over 350 retail chains open across North America, Europe, and Japan, as well as 11 theme parks and 47 resorts in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Business Need
As with any corporation of such scale, complexities arise in the form of data sharing, collaboration, and communication between multiple business groups. In this specific case, visual assets such as audio, video, and photo files are produced in volume by the client’s various businesses, but are not readily accessible due to internal policies, limited discoverability, and scale. Valuable time and effort is spent both attempting to discover deeply buried content items in information silos, as well as recreating content items which already exist in those silos.
To solve this issue, the client introduced a company-wide initiative for seamless discovery, tagging, and sharing of visual, audio, and video assets of all kinds between all business units internal to the client, as well as key external partners.
Akvelon has worked with the client to define and implement a Content Management System (CMS) which would address the above needs. This CMS would become the central validated access point for all of the client’s content, allowing users direct access to content items as well as the ability to share their content in an automated and uniform way.
Solution
As with any large corporation, bootstrapping an initiative to involve all of one’s business units is a complex undertaking. The approach taken was to build a functional proof of concept to demonstrate to C-level budget holders and to sell individual business unit owners on the validity and benefits of the initiative.
The proposed solution was to be implemented as a web accessible portal to surface indexed and searchable content from multiple repositories and end points. Akvelon had to build a user interface, indexing and search engines, video and visual content manipulation engines, and a number of connectors for various end point integration. The access rules and ability to contribute content was implemented to
follow existing corporate standards. The system was designed to handle 500 users, which is projected to scale up to 15,000 as the project continues. The system will be able to work with any end point currently present in a client owned business unit, as well as any future business units the client procures.
Akvelon was brought in on a very short notice as the partner to implement the proof of concept and, if successful, will see to its production and implementation.
Benefits and Results
Akvelon worked quickly and efficiently in creating a proof of concept and, over the course of two days, sold the initiative company-wide.
Akvelon was able to bootstrap a team on a very short notice to support an executive program of high complexity and visibility. The resulting technical delivery quality is efficient and workable, as well as retains a high cost to benefit ratio.
Akvelon is currently working on implementing the CMS into the client’s business.
