Customer stories

Fox Entertainment Group

Fox Entertainment Group integrates content management solution. Entertainment company speeds business decisions and enhances collaboration with OpenText eDOCS

Challenges

  • Information siloes
  • Application inefficiencies
  • Document lifecycle and security gaps

Results

  • Speeds access to business collateral

  • Integrates systems for greater visibility

  • Automates secure distribution

Story

Executive Director of Secure Document Management Services for Fox, Michael Burch, manages all legal and business files related to creative content. Upon joining the entertainment company, a priority mandate called for the replacement of “incredibly old school technology” for handling legal documents.

When it comes to the foundation of a document management system, OpenText eDOCS is the best-in-breed.

Michael Burch
Executive Director, Secure Document Management Services, Fox Entertainment Group

Burch and his team conducted best-in-breed research on document management systems and selected the industry leader, OpenText™ eDOCS.

Fox professionals working in the legal department organize agreements, contracts and other files in the centralized eDOCS repository. In fact, while other Fox personnel may search more than a day for a single document, according to Burch, eDOCS users locate files within three minutes or less.

Reacting to positive reviews from the legal affairs team, Fox professionals in television, home entertainment, digital and other areas also requested eDOCS. The document management technology is now deployed across human resources, payroll, residuals and several other Fox departments.

“They started to understand how easy it was to find all their content,” Burch noted. “Then, looking at their business-critical applications, they started requesting a marriage between these two.”

Integration with Fox’s ERP, CRM and other applications proved straightforward and efficient. “When it comes to the foundation of a document management system, OpenText eDOCS is the best-in-breed,” Burch said. “There isn’t a technology out there that is as feature-rich, configurable and compatible with our application stack that can integrate into systems easily.”

For instance, combining the capabilities of eDOCS and PeopleSoft® allows Fox to capture all HR-related documents in a digital employee file. As its flagship integration project, Burch and his team created a service to extract and encrypt metadata from resumes, acceptance letters, policy forms and other files for ingestion into eDOCS. They then took on the process of adding payroll information to the employee file and extracting data related to salary, vacation and overtime. This information is sent to eDOCS, which is integrated with a service that creates and distributes reports to managing executives. “It was an incredibly valuable project,” noted Burch.

A couple watching tv.

Giving a lawyer or a creative executive the ability to research and find information that quickly sets precedence on a very critical decision that is the difference.

Michael Burch
Executive Director, Secure Document Management Services, Fox Entertainment Group

Based on the successful integration, Fox recognized an opportunity to bridge a collaborative platform between legal affairs and sales. Previously, the legal team maintained all versions of agreements in eDOCS during negotiation. Once printed and signed by sales personnel, the contracts were ultimately stored as hard copies, causing a gap in the digital document lifecycle.

For a clear view into the sales and distribution process, Fox worked with an imaging company to scan every document in the file room and upload completed contracts into eDOCS. The company also connected with system integrators for agreements and amendments in its Salesforce® user interface. For example, when a salesperson selects the Netflix customer tab within Salesforce, they will see agreements and contracts from eDOCS related to Netflix.

“When you start collecting and housing all of this information from all these different business streams, you can start breaking down these silos of information,” Burch noted, lamenting earlier duplication of collateral and document management applications among business departments. “When we can bring all this information together and have transparency in the business, it’s critical.”

Fox also leverages eDOCS for automated distribution of contracts to authorized personnel, enhancing security and timeliness. Previously, the film department shared contracts through inter-office mail or as attachments to an unsecured email.

Fox worked with an OpenText partner to automate the process. Now executed agreements are scanned into eDOCS with permissions based on film distribution lists. A service running every few minutes gathers material to email contacts with links to the files.

“Within a month, we had television and home entertainment screaming for this system. They became so popular that the CIO of our company said we would love to do the same thing for all of our vendor and licensing agreements,” Burch said. “We have a ton of vendor agreements to flow through… now, it’s all automated.”

eDOCS enables other document management capabilities, including a treasury portal, which provides a secure and structured method for Fox corporate and production teams to request wire transfers while ensuring compliance with financial regulations.

Overall, encrypted and centralized data through eDOCS and integrated applications ensures that information is protected and accessible. “Giving a lawyer or a creative executive the ability to research and find information that quickly sets precedence on a very critical decision—that is the difference,” said Burch. “We really cannot live without it.”

Further indicators of a successful deployment include an uptick in content creation and requests from executives for the software solution. Fox expects to continue its relationship with OpenText as it moves from datacenters into the cloud and increases mobile-friendly access to business collateral.

“OpenText itself is a mammoth company,” said Burch, who noted that, despite its size, customers still receive individual attention from OpenText. “Interestingly enough, working with OpenText has a really small company feel to it. I can pick up the phone and get a hold of someone. I’m not in a queue. I don’t have to submit something. It’s as if I were calling downstairs."

About Fox Entertainment Group

The Fox Entertainment Group is an American entertainment company that operates through four segments, mainly filmed entertainment, television stations, television broadcast networks, and cable network programming.