It’s exciting to see that Paramount and Codemill published a case study on the interfaces that we built as part of our supply chain transformation at Paramount. These interfaces represent a lot. We built powerful, innovative technology behind them and drove meaningful operational evolution that reshaped how Paramount delivers content globally.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Jokingly, I’ve also often said a working interface is worth ten thousand. In this case, given the magnitude of what it represents, I’d say it’s worth a lot more than that.

The Challenge: Unifying a Media Giant

The journey started in June of 2021, and we faced a daunting reality. We sought to consolidate multiple separate supply chains that were built for each of Paramount’s many brands — CBS, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, Viacom Domestic, Viacom International, and several international brands — and for their specific, legacy distribution needs. In 2021, this set of separate supply chains, each with its own operational weight, no longer made sense. We were looking to deploy a singular, unified supply chain, with a consolidated operational approach and a clean repository of all Paramount Global’s assets in one place.

It was a massive undertaking. Picture this. Several of those supply chains were still on-premises systems. Each bore unique combinations of technologies, some homegrown and some external. They were all driven by different and nuanced operational approaches.

Assembling the Transformation Team

Transformation is as much about people as it is about technology. We were fortunate to start with exceptional product and engineering leaders like Michael Martelli Jr. and Hardys Eggum . I managed to convince Andy Bolding and Carmen Taitano to join the team, and negotiated with their respective bosses to let me “borrow” their talents. We were also fortunate to partner with and later hire Pi Waller.  Our engineering team was exceptional as well. Of course, operating teams played a huge role as well, but today, I’ll focus on the platform journey. Looking outside of Paramount, we worked closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other key technology partners like LTIMindtree .

As they also say, “Success has many fathers” and in this case, it’s definitely true. We had many contributors and partners. Thank you to all of them.

Building the Foundation: Our Guiding Principles

Success in any transformation starts with clear principles. Ours included:

• Embracing a “cloud first” mindset

• Focusing on solving the leveraged 80% first before tackling edge cases

• Investing energy in differentiating technology rather than reinventing existing, “off the shelf” solutions

• Prioritizing operational improvements in both time and cost

• Maintaining an agile, iterative development approach

• Staying scrappy and resourceful

• Adopting a service-based architecture instead of a monolithic codebase

By the way, though different than the set of principles used at Paramount, David Klee also has an excellent list of design guidelines that he enumerated at mediasupplychain.org. The site is an excellent resource for those interested in the art of media supply.

Building the Foundation: Establishing Common Terminology

A major challenge in starting out platform transformation, especially in a large organization, is reaching common ground on the target state and on terminology. That’s harder than you’d think when you’re dealing with separate teams that have all referred to system components in different ways.

Believe it or not, even seemingly basic concepts like “title” and “version” bore significant discussion. We worked through many discussions and debates on the differences between the respective roles of scheduling and order management. (Though correlated, they’re very different, by the way.)

Short story, breaking down the overall system into the constituent parts was more freighted than you’d imagine, but we reached a collective understanding.

Rising to the Occasion

With those things behind us, the team started working on the evolution of each of the major components and services. Transforming Paramount’s media supply chain was a tough enough problem to solve on its own. The complexity of our challenge was multiplied by concurrent demands:

• Delivering massive content libraries globally to launch Paramount+ and Pluto across more than 20 territories.

• Meeting corporate savings targets

• Maintaining zero-fail delivery for critical content like FBI to CBS, SpongeBob to Nickelodeon, and Yellowjackets to Showtime

We had our work cut out for us, but we did it. We employed a “find to fund” mentality (that is, find [savings] to fund [investment]), which is a fundamental necessity in modern media and entertainment transformations at places like Paramount. I found the same need for the digital transformation at iHeartMedia.

Getting executive sponsorship and air cover is absolutely essential to weather the inevitable bumps and bruises along the way. Thank you to Phil Wiser for his ongoing support throughout the transformation.

The Visible Impact: Interfaces that Transform Work

The recent Codemill and Paramount case study puts a face to the transformation. I encourage you to examine each of the consoles in the case study; It’s easy to see complexity elegantly simplified and made accessible in highly functional interfaces. The interfaces we developed do more than just look good—They make complex operations intuitive.

Each of the interfaces reflects consistent structure that features:

• Advanced filtering capabilities

• Detailed package and component-level information

• A powerful operational workbench

• Comprehensive versioning and audit logging

On examination of the QC Console in the case study, one can also see task management and task assignment capabilities natively built into the interfaces. These nuances speak to how these tools powerfully equip the operations managers and support the operating teams responsible for the processing of the media. Orienting the interfaces to the needs of the operational users is absolutely essential to drive adoption and maximize utility.

In all, the story of Paramount’s transformation demonstrates that with the right team, clear principles, and shared goals, even the most complex challenges can be overcome.

[This post was originally inspired by the publication of a Paramount-Codemill case study on supply chain transformation interfaces.]