The great enemy of the Directors of Programming of a television. Any tv that you want to get high ratings within a rationalization of the resources used (and it would seem that they are all for this work), it is obliged to do simulations of their grills, taking in account several factors such as the cost associated with the purchase/treatment or content generation, the return on investment for advertising, product placement or sponsorship and the information needed to make simulations of hearing according to the historical records.

If you ask the Director of Programming from any television in our country, you will surely be absolutely agree with the previous position, especially by the pressure that used to be part of the people of ‘business’ whose duty is to arrange the numbers and ensure the greatest benefit to the organization.

That said, to implement this approach is not an easy task for a Director of Programming. Usually found with an obvious lack of tools to be able to carry out efficiently their work. The Excel is perhaps one of the most versatile and powerful of our times but also it is one of the worst enemies of the efficiency in which environments. It is true that with a few advanced knowledge of the worksheet we may be able to generate real ‘applications’ to manage grills, even automating some task to another. But the Excel cannot give us certain features necessary to make an efficient management:

How many emissions are to this movie?, How many GRPs obtained the last time the issue?, What was what I thought for the last issue and that you should take into account the next time? I am tired of entering one-on-one chapters of the series, wouldn't there be a way to do it with a single click according to certain predefined rules for myself?

Traffic systems (or Broadcast Management System) are the tool dreamt of by the Directors of Programming to be able to do your work much more efficient.And of course they offer the necessary tools to facilitate the work to the user, such as display of the grill with different views (daily, weekly, possibility to drag&drop the content, viewing the costs and billing in the grill itself, possibility of creating generic wrappers (Evening cinema).

Gone are the programs whose license expires with passes that are still pending (this is called throwing your money down the drain), as the system is able to give a relation of the contents earrings expire on a specific date. What films, documentaries or series we have, whose license expires at the end of next month? With that information we already have some priorities that you enter in the planning and that will not mean a cash out to the company. Or, what content I have available with a license that has already been amortized, but that has not yet expired, and I have more passes? These contents are ‘free’ because they are already depreciated and can be made to lower costs (and increase profits) the day on which the schedule.

But in all this, there is also a topic of operating that I would not like to stay in oblivion. The Excel built manually by the Director of Programming is the basis from which to run a whole series of processes and who will be speaking people and diverse departments. All of them need that Excel as water may for their daily tasks.

Once more the excel becomes the worst enemy of efficiency. It is usual that the spreadsheet will not be available until the week prior to the broadcast. For the Director of Programming is tedious to go using different versions of Excel and therefore tends to put things in black and white only when we are completely safe. Until that time, things are only in your head. Let's see a few processes and problems which arise:

• Contract management and licensing of the content. If the department has to manage the contracts with the producer is unaware of the intentions of the Director of Programming until the last moment, it is difficult to raise a successful negotiation. The rush to close the deal before the issue made that this is not enough beneficial as in the case of having enough time to negotiate.

• Request for material. If we know in advance the programs of ‘others’ we can manage much better time of the request of the physical material of the producer. All the people of the materials used to working with this Excel that is available for only a week before, whereby the anticipation that it could exist in the case of having the information in advance.

• Planning of the promos. It is clear that to know in advance the programs that are there to promote, greatly benefit the management of the department that it has to produce promotional items, and of course the quality of these when you have much more time for maturation. And let's not talk about the cost that represent the extra hours to finish the house in a record time.

All of this is resolved if the program Director has a management tool where you go doing the planning, weeks, months, and even the season ahead. Users with the appropriate rights can consult the grill planned, and that he will suffer many changes in time, but that allows departments to organize with a lot more time and anticipate problems.

- Have you seen Luis has scheduled the documentary ‘Goodbye to Excel’ for the next month? I'm going to call ‘OpenSource Productions’ to let them know, because the last time it took three weeks to send us the tape*...

*Is the tape? But we are still so? Don't tell me that yet you do not work with files...
There will be talk of this some day...