Blockbuster

Project: blockbuster.com
Type: Website and Content Management System

Overview:
Blockbuster, Inc. is one of the world's leading home entertainment companies. Best known for its video rental retail outlets, which number over 7,900 world-wide, Blockbuster has over 40% market share in rentable home entertainment industry. In reaching their 40 million active customers each month, one of Blockbuster's key strategic marketing tools is BLOCKBUSTER.COM.

Early in 2000, Léger was contacted by Blockbuster.Com's executive management team to help transform Blockbuster.com from a retail e-commerce oriented web-site, into a content oriented destination site to support the corporate stores. The Léger Team accepted this challenge, and quickly produced a strategy document, which broke the project down into three key pieces. First, Blockbuster would need a content management application, or "CMA" to help organize content in the core Blockbuster identified categories of Movies, Games and Music. Second, Léger would need to develop a content distribution application, or "CDA" to help reduce Blockbuster's "Maintenance Time", or the time it takes to post new content from content writers to the live site. Finally, Blockbuster planned to integrate their retail and web presence through an "On-Line Rental Reservation" (OLR) system, which would allow customers to reserve and pay for rental inventory at their local location on-line, and then "Just pick it up and go!" without waiting in line at the store. This proved to be a diverse and challenging project, which Léger accepted with enthusiasm.

The results of Léger's involvement in this project were both dramatic and successful. The CMA and CDA developed by Léger successfully integrated an existing 3rd party entertainment information database to the proprietary GUI, designed by Léger. This required the process design and change management strategies to be created from scratch, and the content syndication model to access across multiple user platforms (WAP, wireless and fixed-line web, both broadband and narrowband accessible.) In the end, Blockbuster reduced publishing times from over 7 days to just minutes, which "...got us in the game in terms of other entertainment news and information sites." according to Blockbuster's web-site management.

Léger's creation of the Blockbuster OLR system is truly the first of its kind, integrating Blockbuster's already extensive real-time inventory system with a web-based front-end, then tying the new application back into existing CRM systems. The usability and optimization of delivery studies Léger conducted revealed that most of the OLR system would require proprietary interfaces, which would allow consumers to access Blockbuster stores "Whenever, wherever they want". Although it is difficult to imagine the amount of development work that went into the production of this system, Léger served as the "Senior Consultants" to an internal IT department already in place at Blockbuster. The relationships Léger created based upon the successful management of this daunting task will most likely continue past OLR, and into Blockbuster's future New Media endeavors.

To date, Blockbuster has successfully implemented all of these projects, including the Léger CMA and CDA systems, and OLR. In fact, OLR has shown tremendous promise during testing in Denver, Austin and San Antonio, and Blockbuster expects to see a sales increase of up to 6% when they release this application nation-wide next year. This project has been truly revolutionary, and Léger is proud to have Blockbuster on our list of active clients.

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See It Live:
www.blockbuster.com
www.omega13.com