M+E Daily
North Highland: Entertainment Supply Chain Gets Hip To Social Media, Web 2.0
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The phrase “social media” immediately conjures up images of teens chatting incessantly over Facebook or Twitter. But the technology behind social networks is now being employed to business ends, improving collaboration and maximizing margins within the entertainment supply chain, according to Ted Garcia of North Highland.
Garcia, who heads the consultancy’s media and entertainment practice in Los Angeles, says that increased connectedness via social media and other Web 2.0 technologies is among the top supply-chain initiatives of entertainment content creators and distributors. The platforms have already proven their utility in other sectors, such as consumer electronics, helping to resolve supply issues among vendors, retailers, and logistics providers more quickly than stakeholders’ sole reliance on conventional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Along with Web 2.0 technology such as cloud computing, social media brings with it “convincing ROI,” Garcia says. The technology itself “is relatively low cost” — a plus for an industry that has been lean on investment of late, even as it holds cautious optimism for the market.
Success with Web 2.0 is dependent on how supply chain stakeholders want to utilize the technology, Garcia says. In developing a connected workspace, stakeholders create a phased roadmap of capabilities and functionality they would like to add to their supply chain. As in North Highland’s example graph (PDF here), parties order their desired capabilities by their complexity of implementation as well as the benefit to the overall business.
The first phase might begin with adding the ability to initiate and conduct meetings online through a customizable, centralized tool. As companies progress through the second phase, they may realize benefits such as the ability to search facilities and offices based on location to people, products, equipment, and other criteria.
Garcia acknowledges that “social media” is a loaded term. But ironically, he says that younger generations of executives find it more difficult to understand how social media concepts may be applied in a business context than those who are more experienced with supply chain processes and pressure points.
