During last week’s Clear Channel Outdoor Investor Day, Erika Goldberg, Clear Channel Outdoor Chief of Business Operations talked about the steps she’s taken to improve and automate the company’s operations.
The old way of doing business.
When I joined Clear Channel my immediate focus was on all of our workflows, how out teams were interacting with each other and with their customers…We looked at how many people and teams across the organization touched a single contract…Here is what I found. For each contract there were 156 manual entries, 90 of which were duplicated. There were 9 handoffs that were involved in a process that stretched over three business days. Six approvals were required in six different business systems. Each stage of this process where a potential handoff was involved was a potential point of failure. And each one of those 156 manual entries is the opportunity for a defect.
Automating inventory
Years ago out of home inventory was owned by each of the individual markets…The primary sales channel was local…Our first step was to unify our approach to inventory management. While our local teams still have the responsibility for building and maintaining and maximizing the utilization of their inventory, we’ve created a real time view of their inventory…
A team to assist with RFP’s
It took far too long for our teams to respond to RFPs and build plans and proposals. So we centralized the planning process…our RAPID team. They support the entire sales organization with a fast response service that allows us to move rapidly…RAPID primarily supports our national sales organization…This team prepares more than 1700 proposals each month supporting over 200 different account executives across the US business and since we’ve implemented this team the process of providing proposals has gone from 11 handoffs to 2…and they deliver same day service, averaging a 4 hour turnaround time…
Streamlining creative and production
Once the contract is secured we start the process of activating the campaign. We’ve modernized and streamlined the processes around our physical operation…Traditionally spec sheets were printed documents. But we’ve now automated all the data, so when that order is processed spec sheets are created dynamically. They can be sent to customers via api…which we have made available to numerous agencies. We’ve also connected the creative teams and the steps we use around ordering printed materials…Then once those materials are printed we use QR codes to track when those materials are printed and to match them to the contracts to apply the right copy to the right inventory.
Posting campaigns quicker
Back in the day when a campaign was scheduled to launch on a Monday, what that really meant was that we would start posting that campaign on a monday and typically finish it sometime later that week. But we now have our operations staff running on a 10 your four day weekly schedule that starts in the wee hours Sunday night…because when a customer expects a campaign to post on a Monday, we aim to post it on a Monday…We’ve armed each of these installers with a custom mobile device that includes not only their work orders and the routing for the day but it allows installation photos to be quickly adjusted into our applications as proof of posting.
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