The Situation
The Golf Channel, originally conceived by Joe Gibbs and Arnold Palmer, was the first all digital facility in the US and continues the usage of cutting edge technologies to produce high-quality golf-based media products.

The Golf Channel (TGC) provides four 24-hour channels feeding the US, Canada, Southeast Asia, and Europe. The Orlando, Florida headquarters has 8 non-linear edit suites, an online edit quite, three audio production rooms used for translation, a multi-channel master control, a tape operations area, technical core, news-room, three live production controls, two live audio controls, two studios, a transmission operations room, and an onsite teleport.

The resultant compliment of equipment is myriad of video, audio, and transmission systems provided by a vast assortment of manufactures to best perform functions that TGC requires. Additionally, those systems have control panels, sub-assemblies, software, firmware, and plug-ins.

The Need
In all high-output technology-based facilities, equipment must be maintained and sometimes repaired. Due to the high demands of TGC, the ability to halt operations in one area while maintenance is performed is not always a luxury. Sometimes spare equipment is used while servicing a piece of equipment. That requires tracking where each piece of equipment is and where it has been.

Like most television facilities today, there is small but highly skilled team of engineers. Those engineers must be a jack-of-all-trades and at the same time specialize in each of the many systems at TGC. TGC’s engineers are just those kind of individuals; smart, high-tech, well versed, experienced, dedicated, and able to jump into any fire and put it out. As engineers worked on a particular piece of equipment, they had no idea what, if any, servicing had been performed on that piece of equipment before. And there was no way of knowing what options, components, software versions, firmware versions, or plug-ins were installed without opening up the unit or getting access to it for some research. This is difficult in an Avid room that is almost always in operation.

Additionally, without going through the accounting department and a stack of purchase orders, it was impossible to determine if the equipment was under warranty or not.
If a piece of equipment was being repaired, or a new project (like a new edit suite) was in process, often there was a deficiency in the inventory of service and project parts such as connectors or video heads. The work would halt until parts and supplies could be replenished.

Work requests were submitted via paper. An editor, for example, would fill out a slip of paper residing in a box hung on the wall in front of the engineering department. The request would provide a list of blanks to fill in. The paper would be given to the supervisor who would then assign that slip of paper to a particular engineer. The engineer would solve the problem, fill out the slip of paper and give it back to the supervisor.

Often, and due to multi-work shift patterns of The Golf Channel in both the engineering department and the production departments, solutions to work requests were often completed when the original requester wasn’t there. There was often a lack of feedback to the requester as to the work being completed.

Without a formal and tedious organization system for the completed slips of paper, there was little history as to what was maintenance or service actions were taken and by whom.
Technical Documentation, in form of OEM PDFs, AutoCAD drawings, wire lists, Visio drawings, engineering notes, images and more were somewhat organized on a hard drive dedicated to the engineering department. It was often difficult and time consuming to located a drawing or manual and ensure it was the most current.

The Solution
The Golf Channel had realized for a long time that a software solution was required that would cohesively tie the technical organization together, manage the millions of dollars in physical assets, manage inventory, manage the thousands of technical documents, and at the same time provide an engineering help desk solution.

The Golf Channel chose Obor Digital’s Centralized Technology Management System Zeus to manage their entire technical operations department. “The Golf Channel needed way to not only provide good service to our internal customers, we needed a way within in the engineering department to manage our assets. Accounting had a system that had barcodes and tracked depreciation, but we needed a system made for engineers. We needed to know locations the equipment had lived, if it was under any kind of warranty or service agreement, and what versions of software and firmware were in it. Zeus gave us that and a lot more,” said Bob Van Deering. “And Zeus is so easy to configure that I actually have one of my engineers maintain and configure it. But the best thing is how much money we’ve saved. We’ve seen a savings on average of $60 per work order, not to mention increase in communications both within the engineering department and internally to all the other Golf Channel employees that depend on us. Anyone who requests service from the engineering department can simply look online and see the exact status of their work order. It’s a real time saver.”

The fully configurable workflow within Zeus allows the engineering department to operate with the workflow that suits their operation best. The powerful Zeus lifecycle matrix can be configured to suit any workflow. TGC’s lifecycle matrix routes all new service requests to a supervisor who then routes them to one or more engineers, even identifying one as a lead engineer. Supervisor notes accompany the service request along with due dates and priorities. Before assigning the work order, the supervisor can see how many open work orders each engineer has. The status of the work order is dynamic and real time allowing anyone, including the original service requestor, to instantly know the statuses of their work orders. Engineers can add tasks, parts and even specify resolution codes. The work order automatically calculates parts and labor cost, as well as debits parts from the integrated inventory system. As inventory levels drop below predefined levels, automated queues populate to remind someone to order parts.

The asset management engine provides the details associated with each piece of equipment including its current location, where and when it’s been somewhere else, who has moved it and when they moved it, a list of its complete service history, maintenance costs, warranty information, with what PO it was purchased, what software is installed and what version, a list of firmware installed, options, plug-ins, software authorization numbers and more.

The Zeus document management module indexes and manages over 150 files types including AutoCAD, Visio, and PDF. “It feels like Google Desktop on steroids times a thousand,” says Bob Van Deering. “Our engineers simply type in a few keywords and in less than a second there is a list of everything on the engineering drive that matches the search.”

“We continue to be impressed with The Golf Channel. We consider them to be a great customer and great friends. Their engineers continue to offer helpful suggestions for the future developments in Zeus and we consider those ideas in each release. We are proud to be involved with such a wonderful operation,” said Obor Digital’s CEO, Rob Caldwell.


E-mail: info@obordigital.com