Business Tool Suite Migration

Broadcast Traffic & Residuals

The commercial talent payment service bureau Broadcast Traffic and Residuals wanted to migrate their legacy mainframe-based system to a more "user friendly" windows and web-oriented interface.

Challenges

BT&R's Talent Payment System processes the billing and payment of talent performers for both session work and residuals for broadcast commercials, music and other productions. Since necessary information is often received in an ad hoc manner and out of sequence, the Talent Payment System needs to allow BT&R to initiate the invoicing process flexibly, even when the available data is incomplete.

Solutions

In this long term project, TCS was responsible for providing a broad range of design, usability, documentation and information architecture services to BT&R, including:

• Software Operations Manual
• Code Tables
• Information Architecture
• UI and Usability Engineering
• Windows/Web Data Dictionary
• SourceSafe Structure and Usage Guidelines document
• Office Operations documents

• Conceptual Design
  I'ts always important to capture the fundamental structure of the data, the workflow and the business processes up front, in a clear and easily understandable chart.
• Interaction Design
  The interface for this sophisticated business application need to be both comprehensive and easy to use.
• Online Help
  Interaction design goes a long way towards making the product usable, but you also need to have customer assistance that is easily accessible, appropriate, and interesting.
• Office Guidelines
  This simple "cheat sheet" accompanied a more comprehensive set of documents that helped systematize BTR's office operations.