Case Study: Champions for Effective Communication

To deploy the Windows Media solution, General Mills originally spent $60,000 for Compaq servers; the software came at no extra cost because it was included in the company’s existing Windows NT server software. The corporation’s IT staff built the solution in two weeks of development time. General Mills uses three Windows Media servers—two are dedicated to Champions TV; one machine is used for live video and another is used to send a multicast stream of regular broadcasts. A third server is used to unicast downloads of the company’s commercials archive. General Mills encodes the content with Windows Media Encoder and schedules Champions TV content with Microsoft Outlook and a proprietary scheduling tool that was built by General Mills and which runs on the Windows Media server. A staff member then makes content entries in Outlook’s calendar, and the scheduling tool reads the calendar and tells the server when to broadcast videos.

Forsythe says the first, most notable result in using streaming media was the drop in attendance at live meetings. With Champions TV, employees can monitor meetings online from their computers and still keep up with their workflow. "I think that’s actually a sign of success, and so we had to return our focus on live meetings by better packaging the live event itself, so that it had an appeal of its own," says Forsythe.

There was a cost savings in smaller attendance; in times past, the meeting room facilities could not accommodate all the employees who were required to come to meetings. "Because of the success of Champions TV, we actually downsized the meeting room and moved to a small room and saved a lot of money on what we had previously spent on event support," he says.

Champions TV continues to help the company upgrade its face-to-face communication with employees. "Our secondary benefits include greater ability to drive individual message groups to audiences that may not have been originally targeted or weren’t part of that actual presentation," Forsythe says. For example, a quarterly financial meeting can be re-broadcast to employees who aren’t able to attend in person, but need to be current on this information.

Despite the success found in using streaming media, Forsythe sees room for improvement. For instance, Champions TV has only limited on-demand streaming services. "Certainly, that’s where the world is going, and that’s what I want to do next," he says. "I want to make our system fully available on demand; but again, we have concerns about the potential use of bandwidth for on-demand video."

The high-water mark for Champions TV in action came the day General Mills announced its acquisition of Pillsbury. "We carried the Chairman’s press conference (which was actually in New York) live to all of our employees, as well as his presentation, to all financial analysts, all on the same day," Forsythe says. "We also leveraged the infrastructure to deliver audio via GeneralMills.com to our Pillsbury counterparts."

Like the General Mills’ facilities, Pillsbury buildings eventually were outfitted to be able to access Champions TV as well. Upon completion of the acquisition, on the first day of the new company, all the employees participated simultaneously in a company meeting. "We had one meeting that took place in multiple locations, both at the Pillsbury center and here at our headquarters," says Forsythe, "and we had the Chairman live in New York where he rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. We carried this message to them all at the same time."