When is a business capability too different to be treated in the same way between business units?

We start with supply-chain to see how different the capability is between film production, film distribution and provide crew & equipment.

Film distribution

To sell a film, you need a few type of resources

Rights for distribution

Media to distribute

Promotional material

Optional subtitles

Provide crew & equipment

To provide crew & equipment to customers, you don’t need much more, but different type of resources.

Crew

Film equipment

Promotional material

Film production

Then compare these two business units to film production where we need much more to purchase or rent for the actual production, and everything needs to be just-in-time.

Script / synopsis with rights

Actors & extras

Crew

Props

Makeup & wardrobe

Set design

Locations

Music / score (rights)

Archive media

Film equipment

Summary

Film distribution resources differs very much from resources for Film production and Provide crew & equipment. Provide crew & equipment is a subset of Film production, and use the same resources. The assumption is no overlap between production and distribution, except when we do live events.

Process fit

Our supply-chain process have not been prioritized so far, as we have been concentrating on film production per se. However, better supply-chain for film production lower the costs and delays in production. Thus, we need to improve in this area. Both for allocation of cast and crew, but also for everything else needed in productions, including logistics.

Working assumption is to start with supply-chain in standard APQC, but also using APQC Broadcast as reference, when defining a proper supply chain process for all business units.

Application support

Yamdu supports managing crew & cast, props, set design, media, etc, in production, but not the supply-chain part of ordering from suppliers. What we need is a system that manages items and stock levels, in interaction with Yamdu, as well as purchase orders.

This will work well for film production and provide crew & equipment. However, film distribution uses different data, processes are not the same and you different skills as an employee to manage distribution. From a business perspective, there are no benefits of using the same system as for film production, more of concerns as it’s getting more complicated and with higher license costs.

Conclusion

From a supply-chain perspective, keep film distribution autonomous.