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General Mills
Industry
Packaged Food |
Microsoft Software and Services
Windows Server 2003
Windows Media 9 Series
Enterprise Deployment Guide for Windows Media 9 Series |
Customer Profile
General Mills is one of the world's leading consumer packaged foods companies, with annual net sales nearing $11.5 billion. Well-known consumer products and brands include Cheerios and Wheaties cereals, Old El Paso Mexican foods, Betty Crocker snacks and mixes, and the Pillsbury brand. |
Business Situation
General Mills wanted to upgrade its existing streaming communication system, Champions TV, to deliver higher quality video content more efficiently. |
Solution
Champions TV reaches approximately 15,000 desktops and more than 5,000 additional workers through manufacturing plant kiosks. Using Windows Media Player 9 Series features, including Fast Streaming, server-side playlist, and Variable Speed Playback, the upgraded system delivers high-quality streaming content more efficiently. |
Benefits
The streaming media solution has improved communication and employee participation, reduced travel time and costs, and reduced employee downtime.
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General Mills has deployed Microsoft® Windows Media® 9 Series and Windows Server™ 2003 as a major enhancement to Champions TV, its popular intranet video streaming tool. Champions TV delivers both live and repeat broadcasts of rich-media corporate announcements, departmental meetings, and training events to desktop PCs and manufacturing plant kiosks. Now, more than 20,000 General Mills employees will receive higher quality rich-media programming more quickly and efficiently.
General Mills is one of the world's leading consumer packaged foods companies, with annual net sales exceeding $11.5 billion. Well-known General Mills consumer products and brands include Cheerios and Wheaties cereals, Old El Paso Mexican foods, Betty Crocker snacks and mixes, and Pillsbury brand dough products.
Needing an efficient way to communicate with employees across the United States and around the world, General Mills deployed a streaming media communication system in the spring of 1998, becoming one of the first enterprises to use Windows Media for corporate communications. Named Champions TV, the system is available from the companywide intranet—Champions Network. Both tools take their name from the famous General Mills slogan "Wheaties: The Breakfast of Champions" and are popular throughout the company. Hallmarks of Champions TV include the broadcast of live meetings and events simultaneously to networked General Mills locations, rebroadcast of meetings and events for employees on different shifts and in different time zones, and the ability to enable employees to participate in live events even from remote locations. The streaming media solution significantly reduces production and travel costs, while also reducing employee downtime by eliminating the need for people to fly or drive to company locations for meetings, training, events, or major corporate announcements.
As the popularity of Champions TV has grown, so have the demands on the original streaming system. Seeking improved video quality and the ability to program content more dynamically, General Mills began evaluating Windows Media 9 Series while the technology was still in beta. Through the Windows Media 9 Series Early Adopter Program, General Mills found that the new capabilities of Windows Media would make a significant upgrade possible and bring new life to its aging communication system.
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Champions TV delivers streaming media content 24 hours a day to desktop PCs and kiosks at more than 100 General Mills locations. Regular programming includes the chairman's quarterly report, the annual meeting, employee and departmental meetings, training materials, and product demonstrations. Content for each day is scheduled so employees on different shifts and in different time zones can view the information. Champions TV reaches approximately 15,000 desktops and more than 5,000 additional workers through manufacturing plant kiosks. During a work break, an employee can walk up to a kiosk on the plant floor and access Champions TV, as well as the entire corporate intranet. In addition to Champions TV, General Mills uses Windows Media 9 Series to stream on-demand video to its marketing and advertising employees. For instance, brand managers have on-demand access to product commercials that date from the beginning of television to the present and are archived in an online library.
General Mills spent a month researching streaming media products for its initial solution. It considered and rejected packaged streaming media solutions that ranged in cost from $300,000 to $1 million. The company chose Windows Media because it fit well with the Microsoft infrastructure at General Mills, it offered the capability of both multicast and unicast streaming, and it enabled the company to implement a solution quickly and inexpensively.
Today, the Windows Media 9 Series-enhanced Champions TV takes advantage of improved video and audio codecs and the instant-on/always-on capabilities of Fast Streaming to deliver employees higher quality content at the same bandwidth. Other features, including Variable Speed Playback and a customized scheduling service for the server-side playlist, work in concert to deliver uninterrupted streaming content. General Mills also uses the Windows Media Enterprise Deployment Kit to automatically update and manage the Windows Media Player 9 Series across the enterprise.
A single Windows Media Encoder 9 Series is used for live events and the import of taped content, and one server running Windows Server 2003 is in place to stream content to the entire General Mills network. With the upgrade to Windows Server 2003, General Mills can increase the hours of programming and quality of the video stream without additional hardware or network bandwidth.
Together with Microsoft Certified Partner Approach Inc.  , a consulting firm that delivers digital media solutions for enterprise clients, the General Mills' Information Systems team designed a highly flexible and automatic scheduling system that reads the Champions TV scheduling database and dynamically creates a server-side playlist file. Built using Windows Media Services 9 Series—an optional component in Windows Server 2003—and the software development kit for Windows Media 9 Series, the system makes server administration easier by inserting an animated GIF as filler between scheduled programs and restarting the video stream at the correct place following any server disruption.
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The upgraded streaming media system continues to reduce travel time and costs at General Mills. Before the streaming media deployment, General Mills' chairman was forced to give major presentations at three separate locations—the headquarters in Golden Valley, the Pillsbury Center in Minneapolis, and the research and development center. Now the chairman can give one live presentation from any location and the address is seen in remote locations throughout the company. And employees are no longer required to travel to all meetings or training events because the content is directly available on their desktops or at a kiosk.
General Mills saves additional time and money because it no longer has to reproduce and ship videotapes of presentations, product demonstrations, or archived product commercials. In the past, major corporate announcements were videotaped and sent to all remote company locations, and archived TV commercials were routinely duplicated for new marketing staff. The company has also seen an increase in employee productivity. Workers experience less downtime and readily opt to attend Champions TV-hosted meetings or training sessions because of its availability and convenience.
"The most important benefit has been enhanced communication throughout the company," says Mike Meinz, information technology director at General Mills. "Better communication with employees is typically at the top of every internal survey conducted by a company, so the development of a streaming media communication system is a very positive step. At General Mills we take our commitment to employee communication very seriously and have developed and now improved our Champions TV. You can see the national sales meeting. You can see the finance meeting. You can do all these things at your desktop. And even though manufacturing plant workers don't use a desktop, they can access the same information as other workers-from plant kiosks."
At General Mills the communication flow is faster and smoother. Employees companywide have an improved understanding of the company's direction and strategic imperatives-an improvement the company has quantified in its companywide climate surveys and in separate employee communications surveys. When General Mills announced its plan to acquire Pillsbury, for example, Champions TV broadcast the event live from New York to General Mills locations across North America. Employees were able to watch as company executives made the announcement and answered questions from the investment community and the media. Pillsbury employees and the public could also watch the event as a webcast on GeneralMills.com. Because of the improved communication, employees also have the information they need to better understand the company's overall performance and the significance of their own contributions to the company. Manufacturing employees, for example, can access performance measurements for each plant to see how their plant compares to the company as a whole.
A major communication benefit is the two-way participation enabled by Champions TV. During a live event, employees can submit questions to a special e-mail box and have their questions answered live. They can even submit questions anonymously. "If the chairman is making a presentation to all employees, he can take a question from Cedar Rapids or from Albuquerque or from Buffalo. We can take a question, put it on the screen, and he can read it aloud and answer it," said Tom Forsythe, director of corporate communications at General Mills. "That's live Q&A on the fly." In the past, most employees would see presentations on videotape a few days after the event. "There's a huge difference," Forsythe said. "One-way communication looks packaged, it looks like the company is talking at you. In a two-way conversation, the company is sharing information with you. You can ask questions. You can get answers. There's a tremendous difference."
Streaming media has been a very successful method of communication at General Mills. Expansion plans include the streaming distribution of training content directly to its manufacturing plants for on-demand viewing at kiosks. Plant employees will participate in live classes without ever leaving the facility, and they will have access to custom course work and online quizzes.
"Some day, as we have content, there could be a finance channel, a human resources channel, a research and development channel, and a training channel," Forsythe said. "With Windows Media and Champions TV, we have the ability to do this."
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This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, PowerPoint, Windows, the Windows logo, and Windows Media are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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