Case Studies · The Walt Disney Company, global distribution
Assets kept failing at ingestion because the check was in the wrong place
35%
fewer ingestion failures across platforms
Systemic change
A systemic fix: validation moved upstream, visibility moved up the organization.
The situation
International territory launches across APAC, LATAM and EMEA depended on thousands of assets landing on multiple streaming platforms, each with slightly different technical requirements. Assets were reaching the ingestion stage with the wrong specifications and failing there, where a failure costs the most: the deadline is closest, the fix loops back through post-production, and everyone downstream is waiting.
Leadership, meanwhile, had no real-time view of readiness. Status lived in people's heads and in meetings, which meant risk was discovered late and forecasts were soft.
The cause
Validation was positioned at the end of the pipeline instead of at the beginning. Each platform's requirements existed, but as reference material rather than as a checklist the upstream teams ran. Because no one could see readiness across the catalog, the pattern of late failures looked like a series of individual problems rather than one structural one.
Action
I moved validation to the front of the pipeline. I built a pre-ingestion checklist mapped to each platform's specification and worked with post-production teams to align asset formatting before anything left the building. The same mismatch that used to surface at ingestion now surfaced at handoff, days earlier and far cheaper to fix.
I then built an executive readiness dashboard in Power BI that pulled from post-production, delivery and asset systems: which assets were ready, which were at risk, and where the bottlenecks were, by territory and platform. I also rewrote the master delivery procedures and ingestion schedules, working backward from the critical path.
The result
Ingestion failures dropped by 35 percent, and launch readiness improved across territories. On-time delivery for the global catalog improved by 15 percent. Forecasts became more accurate because risk was visible earlier, and leadership could make critical-path decisions without waiting for a meeting.
Defects addressed
- —Platform specifications were reference material, not a gate. Each one is now a checklist the upstream team runs before handoff.
- —Readiness was only knowable by asking. It is now visible on a dashboard that updates without a meeting.
- —Schedules were built forward from the start date. They are now built backward from the hard date, with the expensive checks placed early.
Lessons learned
Every destination's requirements should be captured as a checklist that runs at the earliest point a defect can be detected, and that checklist should live in the process documentation so it survives staff changes. Readiness should be visible to leadership without a meeting, and schedules should be built backward from the hard date with validation placed where it is cheapest.
This is the kind of situation I consult on under Program Management.
