The Shopping Channel
Nationwide Broadcaster Improves Collaboration with Microsoft .NET Framework
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Company Overview
The Shopping Channel is a 24-hour, seven-day-per-week broadcast retailer seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers across Canada. It provides shoppers with a variety of unique and brand-name products ranging from jewellery to household appliances.
The Shopping Channel runs live segments each day devoted to a particular product – in order for each segment to move forward in a seamless and timely fashion, they are scripted prior to going to air, and each script is distributed to a variety of crew members and call centre sales staff. Despite years of rapid growth and having been acquired by Rogers Communications Inc., the broadcaster still relied on an aging, custom-built software system to help it generate live segment scripts for its crew and sales staff.
Business Challenge
“It looked like an old MS-DOS program. It was actually designed to help us set up special offers for viewers, but we asked the supplier to modify it to handle our scripting needs. This new program required a lot of data entry, was very cumbersome to use, and it only provided our crew with basic information,” says Erik Penno, director, TV Programming & Web Retail, The Shopping Channel.
To succeed, The Shopping Channel must be nimble – the broadcaster constantly tracks its sales to see how a particular segment is performing. Based on those results, it may choose to move or revise a particular segment. The old system, however, could only generate scripts in hard copy, so if a revision needed to be made it had to be re-entered into the system and built again from scratch. Departments that handled commercials, marketing and show scripts created their own documents – all of which also had to be revised.
“Any time we made a change, we had to redo all the copies – that meant photocopying them, distributing them to all the members involved. In a live environment like ours, getting all that done was pretty difficult,” says Penno. Handwritten notes and workarounds added to the inefficiencies and inaccuracies. Staff became frustrated by the need for duplicate data entries and tedious script revisions.
As well, call centre staff often field calls from viewers unsure of the name of a particular product, and they use scripts to help meet the customer’s request. Using hard copies made the process unnecessarily slow. “We started looking at ways to make the system more efficient, and to revamp all of our workflow,” says Penno.
The Shopping Channel needed a system that would help it manage scripts in a way that would enable instant revisions, accessible by all key stakeholders when they needed it, and that would integrate with its front-office Microsoft®-based applications running on Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. After putting out a request for proposals, it chose a solution from a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based on the Microsoft .NET Framework.
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Solution
Tasked with modernizing script-building software at The Shopping Channel, Systemgroup worked with the broadcaster and took advantage of the Visual Studio® development system to build a new, customized .NET-connected application dubbed ScriptSure.
Built with C#, ScriptSure is closely integrated with The Shopping Channel’s existing proprietary COBOL-based catalogue system to help provide staff with access to real-time inventory and cataloguing information, which helps with the development of scripts for on-air shows. In addition, the solution guides script programmers through the necessary steps required to build accurate scripts by applying Shopping Channel business rules and practices. Once developed and approved, scripts are available online and can be published in various formats (PDF, HTML, XML) for consumption by each department. Each script defines a show by dictating, to the second, what is displayed live on-air. Integrated on-air graphics features provide real-time advertising and promotional feeds to video.
“By taking advantage of the .NET Framework, we ensured that ScriptSure was able to closely integrate with existing applications, making collaboration easier. This was a key selling point for The Shopping Channel,” says Ken Ryder, vice president, Systemgroup Inc.
Business Benefits
Using ScriptSure, a solution built with Visual Studio and taking advantage of the .NET Framework, The Shopping Channel now enjoys near-seamless integration across the organization. Staff are able to write scripts in a more timely fashion, enabling the organization to generate more revenue.
More efficient workflow
For staff who have a hand in script-building, ScriptSure has helped The Shopping Channel operate more efficiently, producing better scripts faster, and reduced hours of data re-entry from having to change entire scripts. Now, scripts are changed on the fly, ensuring only those changes that are required are made.
As well, before the introduction of ScriptSure, it was not always possible to verify that a particular script was the most recent version. This sometimes left the crew with two versions of scripts in production, leading to miscues.
“The newly integrated system provides us with huge time savings by simplifying tasks, and provides our programming staff with the ability to focus on developing a better show flow, and more engaging promotions,” says Penno.
Reduced operating costs
By collaborating more quickly and effectively, and avoiding the added cost and hassle of manual script rewrites, The Shopping Channel has refocused approximately 50 person hours a day across a variety of job roles back into more business-enhancing work. As a result, Penno estimates that around $1,000 a day in salaries is being reinvested in more productive work.
“When we put together our proposal of person-hour time savings, which we used to help sell the project to our executives, we told them it would save us at least 30 person hours per day. We’ve definitely accomplished that,” says Penno.
Improved customer service
With ScriptSure enabling staff to create and revise scripts digitally, The Shopping Channel has been able to save on the cost of paper. More importantly, when call centre sales agents need to refer to the script to help customers select a product they had seen hours or even days prior the call, they can do so using ScriptSure over their PCs, and no longer have to wade through documents to find the information.
“That means we can take more calls, and when you do that, you’re boosting revenue because you’re converting calls a lot better. There’s a big value there,” says Penno.
Stable, scalable platform
The Shopping Channel has continued to modify ScriptSure, even adding a tool that enables it to automatically generate television graphics. Because ScriptSure plays such a key role in supporting The Shopping Channel programming, new additions or revisions to it must be done with full confidence that there will be no unplanned downtime or that delays won’t affect programming, and thus affect revenue.
“This is one of they key reasons we went with Microsoft and .NET. We knew we were going to be constantly adding to this application as we grew and became even more efficient. The ability to generate TV graphics and other functions have been major wins for our production team,” says Penno.
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows(r) component for building and running the next generation of applications and XML Web services.http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice.http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/
Acquire Visual Studio .NET: http://shop.microsoft.com/devtools/default.asp
MSDN(r) Subscriptions:http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-ca/vstudio/aa718656.aspx
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Systemgroup Inc., call (905) 278-7700 or visit the Web site at: www.systemgroupinc.com
For more information about The Shopping Channel, call (888) 2020-888 or visit the Web site at: www.theshoppingchannel.com
