Question

Pick a company (for example: Walmart, CVS, Amazon, Apple, Costco, Stop and Shop..etc) and provide a short report regarding the production and the strategic OM decisions in that company.

1. Introduction

- Production (goods or services)

- Productivity and market challenges

- Future trends and plans

Ten Strategic OM decisions( Pick 3 or 4)

References

Answer 1

Introduction:

Zee Entertainment is a part of Essel Group and one of the largest private sector media companies. Having started with a single channel, Zee TV, the company has unique shows and curated content to a largely South Asian audience hungry for new-age entertainment. Over time, Zee has expanded into a multinational colossus that straddles the Media and Entertainment industry, creating innovative content for a discerning audience and uniting the world through entertainment.

Production (Services):
To understand the work done at Media house, it is vital to understand the supply chain in media industry. The programs are created by Production houses in coordination with programming teams, part of Zee and they undergo extensive video quality checks before the program goes on air.

For a TV program, quality is to ensure that entire program is available with no loss of audio, color or depth of content. It is quite often possible that audio levels of a file can go beyond the permitted TV levels and such cases can occur even after extensive efforts have been put in for mastering. If the quality team observes that the audio channels are beyond the permitted lower or upper levels, such areas are highlighted and shared back to Production houses for error correction. The same goes for Video corrections. There are multiple areas which can have black spots or color glitches or color bars appearing. There can also be causes of frame freeze which can temporarily make the video seem to be paused. Though these are in milliseconds, Media houses have quality check equipment’s which do a thorough check and ensure that all such areas are highlighted. The channels themselves give out huge penalties to media houses if such issues are not taken care of before program goes on air. For any media house which runs 24 x 7, the quality team have to work round the clock to ensure that such issues are identified are highlighted.

At the end of every month, the issues are consolidated and meetings are done with Production houses to share the month`s performance. This is the production cycle for any production/ media house.

The major aspects of quality from media point of view is to have the right video available at the right time with the right audio and subtitle if applicable. If any of these is out of sync, the entire video may not go on air even though all other aspects may be the best.

Challenges:
In the past, with lack of technological support, all quality check was done manually and there have been multiple cases when program has gone on air with numerous minor issues which get highlighted by end customers and the media houses end up paying a huge amount. Now due to technological advances, this issue has been reduced. For any media house to be considered as being able to deliver quality content continually, there should not be any case of audio or video glitch in the program which get highlighted by consumers. Other challenges faced by zee include:

1. Unable to cope up with competitors in promoting new shows
2. Unstable viewership
3. Delay in adapting to changing viewer demands
4. Difference in promotion of content in regional areas
5. Highly statistical driven rather than focusing on emotional connect with audience

Future trends and plans:
Zee has been a forefront runner in implementation of new technology and setup of standards in the media market. Few major plans which Zee is currently discussing are:

1. Tie ups with international media production houses for rights on showing movies
2. Focus on channels for kids and youngsters
3. Focus on humor based channels
4. Higher leverage of Digital media

The major operational management decisions taken by zee for effectively running the business are:

1. Design of Goods and Services
2. Quality Management
3. Process and Capacity Design
4. Location Strategy
5. Layout Design and Strategy
6. Human Resources and Job Design
7. Supply Chain Management
8. Inventory Management
9. Scheduling
10. Maintenance

Detailing few of these. The quality management aspect was already explained above. Quality plays an important role and cannot be ignored. End consumer and broadcasting bodies have taken quality aspects very seriously and the complaints have ensured the production plan and quality mechanism have been improved.

The supply chain management of zee or media house in short is as follows:

1. Programming team creates concept of program
2. Production houses create draft videos
3. Programming team reviews and provides creative inputs. These steps are repeated will a final approval is obtained, usually takes 3-4 iterations of shots.
4. Production houses prepare the final mixed content after editing from post production teams
5. Quality team reviews the content for quality errors
6. In Parallel the legal team identifies any prospective legal issues/regulation issue
7. If all are found ok, content is shared to broadcasting center.
8. The content gets transferred to end consumers using different mediums

The location strategy plays a vital role in a media scenario. Most major networks have studios where entire scenes are created. In case of Zee, such infrastructure is not available with them. So content is produced by productions houses at individual specific locations. The content is then transferred to post production teams. Typically each production house have their own post production facility. But Zee has observed that logistics of tapes and digital media flow creates a lag in sharing the final content. To reduce this, Zee has taken an initiative to bring all the teams into a single facility where zee rents the equipment’s to production houses. This ensures that individual production house do not have to spend high on infrastructure and zee has control over all the equipment’s being used.

Reference: http://panmore.com/google-10-decisions-areas-operations-management-productivity

Zee: I have worked in zee. No external documents available which describes the internal working of zee.