Industry: Broadcasting | Product: Adobe LiveCycle | Adobe Air | Avoka FormCenter
Broadcast Australia is a company which operates broadcast towers around Australia, serving clients that include the ABC, SBS, and numerous commercial radio stations. Reliability is paramount: if the company’s services falter, television and radio broadcasts can be interrupted, an outcome both the general public and Broadcast Australia’s clients prefer to avoid.
With 600 sites and employing a team of 130 to maintain its infrastructure, the company inspects each broadcast facility at least annually. As many of the company’s towers are a three-hour drive from another facility, the company’s staff make lengthy road trips and inspect several sites during trips lasting a week or more. In the past, the company relied on paper-based processes to complete inspections, with staff submitting forms when they returned to head office, often days or weeks after the inspection was completed.
Technicians then complete that form, which offers validation features to ensure the right data is being captured, and use wireless broadband to upload it to Broadcast Australia’s headquarters so that any necessary repairs or enhancements can be initiated. That process now starts while technicians are in the field, eliminating the delay between data collection and action.
Unsurprisingly this meant the system operated slowly, yet a completed form could contain important information that required swift action to ensure a broadcast facility continued to deliver uninterrupted transmission.
Recognizing a need for greater efficiency, Broadcast Australia took a decision to implement a smart forms solution with Avoka. This technology allows for the creation of custom forms describing the equipment on each of its sites. Data to populate the forms is stored on a Mini SQL database, and as technicians visit a site, forms are created with just the fields needed for that location and the type of inspection being conducted.
Technicians then complete that form, which offers validation features to ensure the right data is being captured, and use wireless broadband to upload it to Broadcast Australia’s headquarters so that any necessary repairs or enhancements can be initiated. That process now starts while technicians are in the field, eliminating the delay between data collection and action.
The solution’s key component for such an occasionally connected environment is the Adobe AIR application that allows site data to pre-populate site inspection forms (Radio Towers). The AIR application holds all inspection forms required as well as ad-hoc incident reports that may be required. The AIR application also manages all data submission synchronization and new task assignment.
This solution has brought several benefits in efficiency and effective business procedures for Broadcast Australia. Not only has it made the process faster, it also offers more consistency, as reports are captured in the same format and they are stored in one single, central repository. Furthermore, this enables analysis of trends and planning for proactive maintenance, additionally making it possible to plan future training for staff.
Moreover, there is a great return on the investment: with four thousand reports a year, the organization estimates it is saving thousands of hours and greatly improving its service to their clients.
