Products

Product Overview

Ficus is the most proven and mature Business Process Manager (BPM) system in the broadcast industry.

Most broadcasters are implementing file-based systems in their facilities and yet many continue organising the way they work according to the inherent limitations associated with old tape-based technology. It’s easy to forget that going tapeless is not the ultimate goal but rather a key, opening possibilities of improving productivity by organising the way people work in a logical and efficient manner. Ficus enables broadcasters to simplify and redesign workflows according to business requirements rather than technical processes. Efficiency and savings are thus achieved by automating as many tasks as possible while reducing the number of man-hours required and the incidence of operational errors.

Any workflow involving media assets can be defined, executed and monitored by Ficus. Each individual step of the productive process is systematised and automated whenever possible, and the usage of available resources and workloads are optimised accordingly. Other systems available today fail to do this: they offer a few prefabricated workflows that can be customised within limited parameters or they offer to write new code, whereas Ficus provides the tools to implement dozens or hundreds of workflows, each and every one designed from scratch around the customer’s unique requirements.

Ficus ensures operators interact in a coordinated way by producing work orders based on the user’s profile, his/her specific responsibilities and by taking in account the global priorities, resources available, deadlines, etc. of the entire production chain.

The powerful combination of Ficus + Tedial’s MPM systems performs all third-party integrations, media moving and file processing required by each of the workflow’s different steps. In orther words, we ensure that all processes that can be automated are automated. This in turn allows operators to focus on the creative process they excel in, rather than wasting time doing mechanical and repetitive tasks.

The Ficus Monitor GUI provides a general view of the workflows and their pending stages. It also flags possible bottlenecks, and takes actions to improve the system’s performance and workload.

Ficus has been designed to be tightly integrated with traffic in a bidirectional way. Traffic systems can drive Ficus so that most workflows and their associated work orders are launched and executed automatically. Ficus operates with a global database, which queries and updates all third-party databases involved in the workflows ensuring that information and metadata is consistent throughout the entire system.

From the outset Ficus has been conceived to tackle the specific challenges of broadcast environments and the management of very large video files. It features special functionality such as an integrated multimedia player for versioning, creating segments, validating subtitles, etc. It generates specific reports covering ingest and QC tasks. Ficus is designed to integrate using the best possible methods available with the facility’s third party systems and their databases.