HITS

By Chris Carey, CRO, Managing Director of the Americas, Iyuno Media Group –

The COVID-19 crisis has caused our industry to make dramatic strategic changes in order to continue our work. In some ways it has forced us to rely solely on strategies and tactics that were at one time more an exception than the norm. Now, tools that allow for production to be done at home, including online collaboration and asset management programs, have become critical to delivering a quality product on time.

In the first few months of this unprecedented environment, Iyuno has identified key learnings and has already begun implementing solutions that are helping us deliver projects fast, with as little interruption as possible.

Use of cloud-based platforms

More than just a centralized platform to handle project and resource management across an organization, the implementation of cloud-based platforms has quickly become the connective tissue to keep all of our projects up and running. Just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, our organization completed a large-scale merger, which nearly doubled Iyuno’s global footprint. One of our most important tasks internally has been implementing our own proprietary project and resource management tool.

Its primary purpose was to unite the company’s operations, helping manage nearly 10,000 global vendors and deliver more than 50,000 hours of content every month, across facilities located in 30 countries around the world. Whether or not we knew it then, this implementation has become critical in helping us in this time of unprecedented business challenges. Using this cloud-based platform, our teams have now shifted to nonessential staff working remotely at home while still having full, centralized and secure visibility across all of our projects from order to fulfillment.

Transparency in communications

Communication with clients and partners is always important, but during a crisis it matters more than ever to be in constant contact, as situations are changing by the minute around the world. More than ever clients want to track the status of their projects, often in real-time. We’ve built a platform to provide visibility for all projects across all of Iyuno’s global locations with real-time tracking.

This was originally utilized as a tool to not only provide great customer service, but also reduce the amount of time spent on updates so we could focus more on completing the project.

But during this challenging time, it has proven to be a game-changer in putting our customer’s minds at ease, by being able to see the current status of the project at any time. We have also adopted proactive updates on our team’s approach and the status of our facilities as the crisis continues to unfold. Changes in our workflow are also being communicated with all of our partners.

True collaboration

Collaboration across offices is always an important strategy to help speed the delivery of a client project. Now more than ever, we are making our project teams global, utilizing a “follow the sun” approach to projects and shifting resources around the world at any given time based on the collective avail-ability of our team’s capacity. Now when local governments mandate a stay-at-home order, we are able to transfer essential studio work to be completed in a location that is completely operational with team members who are fully aware of the project.

Advanced resource planning

By utilizing advanced planning, assets and staff are available around the world to en-sure projects are delivered on time. Working with our client’s planning teams well in advance, and in anticipation of a worst-case scenario, we have been able to set staging and allocate our available worldwide capacity, including during and after the pandemic, to ensure maximum output of deliveries.

Innovation by necessity

Often with a challenging situation, the best innovations are brought to the forefront quicker. We are rising to these challenges and finding solutions. The most recent ex-ample is the exploration of home recordings to minimize the impact to dubbing projects. When the voice work for our dubbing projects needed to be completed outside of the studio, our team quickly converged to begin testing a new proprietary home recording applications.

We are building it to be simple to install, set up and use which allows voice talent and directors the opportunity to focus on their craft and not the technology. As with the rest of our industry, we hope this crisis passes as quickly as possible. But with some ingenuity and the utilization of best practices, we hope to continue delivering a quality work product for our customers with as little disruption as possible.

We also know that this global pandemic will permanently change the way remote work will be done. We will continue to find a way to get that work done in a virtual environment, looking for the best technology available and creating solutions, where a current one does not exist.

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