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Clear Channel Communications

Media Case Study: BPM & SOA enabled a mega media transaction between CCC and an internet search engine leader
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Media Case Study

Clear Channel Communications (CCC, now known as iHeartMedia), the mass media corporation, turned to Interfacing to help launch a process documentation program and move towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to maximize the flexibility of their IT structure and allow their business to remain competitive. This stemmed from a requirement to allocate more than 10% of its radio ad space to content obtained by a search engine it had a strategic alliance with. Especially since CCC works with several ad agencies, the need to have a fluid and standard approach for processing such a high amount of traffic was imperative to meeting the criterion.

Media Case Study Results

The process documentation program allowed for:

Sales Process Efficiency

The initiative streamlined end-to-end processes and generated a standard approach for handling a multitude of scenarios.

Efficient Management Implementation

Having a better understanding of the implications behind their teams’ activities helped management determine where to best allocate resources.

Improved Work Distribution

Having access to models that showcased average processing and waiting times gave teams a more realistic view on each others’ workloads.

Improved Time to Market

Agents could see where the bottle necks were within their processes and, by that, could remediate the issues more accurately.

In 2006, CCC had more than:

In Revenues

Monthly Radio Listeners

In Assets

Radio stations

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 operations

Project Benefits

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

The Solution: Develop a strong process culture with BPM

The SOA approach requires making changes in how one thinks about a company’s organization. Simply upgrading technology is relatively easy compared to the challenges that are faced on a process level. These difficulties have made SOA implementations dependent 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’s environment, including organizational shifts in architecture and the adoption of an approach that encourages innovation and solution development.

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