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Interfacing Two Giants

BPM and SOA enables mega media transaction between Clear Channel Communications (CCC) and an internet search engine leader

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The Challenge: Create a New Ad Sales Process that Crosses Company Lines

CCC’s mega-deal with one of the world’s leading search engine providers in early 2006 required that it allocate more than 10% of its Radio Ad inventory to sales channeled over the internet by the search engine provider. This made it necessary to develop a new, agile and innovative Ad Sales process in order to support the magnitude of these transactions.

Their goals:

• Allowing customers to upload audio advertisements on the internet for broadcast on radio stations
• Alignment of Sales and Back-Office operation

 

How? By Creating Harmony and Agility with SOA and Business Process Management

The approach CCC chose was to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). CCC’s process maturity played a key role in enabling the transition towards aligning the processes of their own internal functions with those of their newfound partner. Processes were supported by service hierarchies that ‘wrap’ existing systems and applications to make use of logically structured functions without needing to replace such systems from the outset which would have caused chaos and project breakdown.

The Solution: Develop a strong process culture with BPM

The SOA approach requires making changes in how one thinks about company organization. Simply upgrading technology is relatively easy compared to the challenges that are faced on a process level. These difficulties have made SOA implementations dependant on a strong process culture, and required the service orchestration to be managed with a decentralized BPM top-layer.

With the deal sealed, CCC took its process maturity to the next level, leveraging its enterprise-wide process repository – the Enterprise Process Center® (EPC) – combined with localized initiatives using Visio-based process maps describing both the business and IT aspects of their operations.

The Benefits: Massive improvements

Clear Channel’s SOA initiative required several changes to the company environment, including organizational shifts in architecture and the adoption of an approach that encourages innovation and solution development.

Project Benefits

• More efficient sales processes
• More effective management implementation
• Better distribution of work
• Quicker time-to-market

See more case studies here: BPM Case Stories.

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