NBC's Olympian Effort

For NBC, shipping everything it needs for its broadcast from the Olympic Games in Sydney has been a months-long exercise in planning and preparation.

By -- Logistics Management, 9/1/2000

Here's something that even the most logistics-minded among us probably never think about as we munch chips and watch the Olympic Games on television. How do the television networks get all those cameras, electronic equipment, sound gear, studio sets, trailers, and more to places like Nagano and Barcelona? And what do they do with this equipment after the games are over?

Even when the Olympics are held in cities with well-developed logistics infrastructures, moving the mountains of needed broadcasting equipment is a complex and demanding assignment. Shipping it all back to the point of origin can be equally difficult owing to customs regulations and the very short time frame allowed for removing everything from the Olympic Games sites.

Those are just some of the challenges that face the logistics professionals at NBC Olympics Inc., the National Broadcasting Corp. subsidiary that is responsible for broadcasting the Olympic Games to U.S. audiences. As the story that follows illustrates, getting ready for this month's events in Sydney, Australia, required intensive long-term planning, excruciating attention to detail, and some creative collaboration between engineers and logisticians.

The Logistics Team

George Yarusavage, director of technical logistics for NBC Olympics Inc. in Stamford, Conn., has been preparing for the Sydney Games for almost two years. Until about a year ago, he worked alone, developing a strategy for organizing, consolidating, shipping, tracking, clearing through customs, storing, and deploying each of the thousands of items needed to build and operate NBC's equipment, vehicles, and facilities at more than a dozen venues in and around Sydney.

Last year, Yarusavage brought on board the rest of his staff: Kelly Durga, transportation manager; Martha Mahoney, manager of inventory and warehousing; Derek Ehmen, warehouse project manager; and Debbie Snell, administrator. Mahoney has been in Sydney since April; Ehmen joined her in July, and Yarusavage and Durga joined them in August and September, respectively. In addition, NBC hired full-time staff in Sydney to assist with receiving and managing inventory and delivering items to event sites.

The logistics group has a $3.5 million budget and is charged with supporting the construction and operation of several facilities in Sydney. One of the most important is the Field Shop, a combination warehouse/supply/repair center where shipments are received, logged in, stored, and then shipped out to event sites as needed. The Field Shop also serves as a spare-parts depot and repair facility for a dozen vendors that have technical staff on hand to support equipment that is being used by NBC. Another is the International Broadcast Center, located at the main event venue in the suburb of Homebush Bay. There, NBC will have the largest of all the international television and radio broadcast studios. The company will have several remote broadcast "compounds" at various sports arenas as well.

Yarusavage's logistics team also is responsible for delivering trucks and vans containing portable broadcast control rooms and news-gathering equipment. NBC, moreover, will have so many employees at the Games that it will build its own cafeterias using equipment shipped from the United States. Logistics has even had a hand in sending camera crews and their equipment to and from the athletes' home countries to film interviews.

Compliance Complexities

The key to making the Olympics broadcast possible, Yarusavage reports, is a phenomenal amount of advance planning. A little more than a year ago, he visited Australia and met with Sydney-area representatives of San Francisco, Calif.-based Fritz Cos. Fritz is handling all of NBC's international freight forwarding and customs brokerage for the Sydney Games in the United States, Australia, and other countries. "I was able to visit all of the Sydney facilities that Fritz decided to use, walk through them, and see how everything would be handled, stored, and delivered," Yarusavage says. Because establishing a good working relationship with Australian government agencies early on was important, Yarusavage and Fritz personnel also met with Australian customs and quarantine authorities. (The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, known as AQIS, is charged with preventing agricultural pests and diseases from entering the country.)

Most of NBC's equipment is eligible for a special Olympics duty exemption, but to qualify, NBC must comply with a host of documentation requirements. "Anything we bring into Australia in support of the broadcast is duty-free, but we have to enter it under their 162A Customs Exemption," Yarusavage explains. When material leaves the country after the Games are over, each item must be matched with its import documentation in order to maintain the original duty-free entry status, he adds. (A few items are of such low value that it is less expensive to process them as regular commercial entries and pay duties than go through all the exemption documentation steps.)

A similar process applies to exports from the United States, says Fritz's Dave Smith, a client relations executive and his company's primary liaison with NBC Olympics in the United States. "We have to register goods on a specific customs form and obtain from U.S. Customs at each export gateway a proof of export," he says. Without those registrations or proofs, NBC would have to pay duties when it brought non-U.S. goods back into the United States, he notes. To prevent such problems, Fritz's customs brokers work closely with NBC on the export shipments so that everything is prepared ahead of time for the return trip. "Our Trade Management Services group has outlined what's necessary from a customs-compliance standpoint," Smith says. "We know well in advance what the import requirements will be."

NBC and Fritz's Olympics joint project team must work with other Australian regulatory agencies too. AQIS, the quarantine authority, requires that all wood used in packing and in the ocean containers be treated to eliminate diseases and pests. "We've had to fumigate many shipments at a specified temperature and dosage," Yarusavage says. Great care must be taken in how and where that fumigation is done, he observes. "There are two main acceptable fumigation agents. The one that's friendly to electronics and rubber is available in the United States but not in Australia. So we have to do our fumigation here."

AQIS also must inspect and approve all foodstuffs that NBC brings in for its catering operation, he adds. Another agency, the Therapeutic Goods Authority, must approve all of the medications, first-aid supplies, and personal care items that NBC will import for its nearly 2,000 guests and more than 2,000 permanent and temporary employees.

NBC's lasers and video monitors emit radiation, so they also are subject to U.S. inspection requirements on their return. NBC must provide the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officials with certifications of the units' radiation output and adherence to U.S. federal health standards. Even the mobile broadcast-control units are subject to regulation. Says Yarusavage: "If we bring them into Australia with tractors, then we import them as a vehicle and they are subject to all restrictions on vehicle use. If we use an Australian power unit, then we won't need a special permit-but that raises compatibility issues and the need for electrical and hydraulic adapters."

Modal Choices

The magnitude of NBC's Sydney Olympics project is hard to imagine. The company began shipping supplies and equipment to Australia more than a year ago. The vast majority of those shipments originated in the United States, but a significant number came from Japan, the United Kingdom, and a handful of other countries.

To date, NBC has moved more than 135 ocean containers, primarily 40-footers and some 20-foot high-cube units. The broadcaster owns 85 of those containers. It makes sense to own some containers, Yarusavage says, because they are needed for secure, cost-effective storage of equipment between Olympic events, and many of them are custom-fitted with special shelves and attachments. Because NBC can store reusable equipment in its own ocean containers, moreover, the company can minimize handling of delicate electronic instruments and fragile studio and scenic pieces.

Not everything moves by ocean, though. "Which mode we use depends on when the equipment has to be available in Sydney and when it will be available from the supplier. In the case of non-critical shipments, we sometimes will have a consolidator collect items that are too small to go on their own," Yarusavage says. The total cost of using equipment also enters the picture. For example, the logistics group found that it was more expensive to ship some leased equipment by lower-cost, but slower, ocean service than it was to move that equipment by air and shorten the lease time.

The delicate nature and high value of NBC's equipment also influenced modal choices. A prototype electronic platform was tested for durability on different conveyances. After making test shipments via road, rail, and ocean, NBC's engineers found that railcar vibrations were more likely to damage the delicate devices, so intermodal shipments were banned. When the unit was shipped in an ocean container, the humidity was expected to be dangerously high. The solution was to use desiccants inside the container to absorb humidity. Even that required adjustment, Yarusavage says. "The test container arrived too dry, which raised the level of static electricity inside. Our engineers told us that we had to use half the original amount of desiccants."

The last ocean shipments left the United States at the end of July; everything since then has gone by air. More than 450 air shipments of various sizes were made prior to the Opening Ceremonies. According to Yarusavage, some last-minute items, such as repair parts that are not available from the Field Shop, may be shipped via air as late as the first week of the Games.

Just Add Water ...

One of the most unusual aspects of the logistics team's assignment has been its unique collaboration with the TV network's design engineers. Now that NBC has finally been able to negotiate contracts for several future Olympic Games, the company has embarked on a program to build modular studios and other broadcast equipment that can be stored and reused.

"In the past, there normally would be temporary, on-site construction and at the end, it would be disassembled or bulldozed. There was very little reuse and it was very expensive," Yarusavage says. With the new emphasis on reuse and long-term cost control, the logistics team has been included in the design process from the start, developing new ways to transport units and making sure that modules were designed to fit in appropriate shipping containers.

This creative program has led to the design of reusable units like "JAWS" (the Just Add Water Studio), a soundproof, self-contained television studio that can be set up inside larger structures. Yarusavage compares JAWS to a giant Erector set, with everything needed to build the studio in a "kit" that fills four dozen 40-foot ocean containers. In Sydney, construction workers laid out a gridwork and concrete foundation, then built a set of "legs" that formed a frame. Electric motors raised the building's roof to a height of 33 feet; installation crews built the walls and added prefabricated interior sections. After that, Yarusavage says, it was a matter of just "plugging into the electricity and connecting to a chilled water source, and there's your studio."

Another collaboration between logistics and design engineers is known as RIBS, which stands for the Racks In a Box System. The RIBS project developed modular electronic equipment in standard racks that are permanently attached to wheeled platforms. The units, built by Sony Electronics in San Jose, Calif., were shipped to Australia in specially modified 20-foot high-cube containers that have tracks built into their floors. The racks were rolled into the containers and locked in place. At the International Broadcast Center, technicians rolled them out of the containers and directly into NBC's electronics room. That's a real time and money saver, says Yarusavage. "Instead of building an entire broadcast system on site ...," he says, "we just rolled them out along the floor to be installed, and in a couple of weeks, Sony's team had them hooked up just the way they were when Sony built them."

The logistics-engineering collaboration has addressed not only hardware but software as well. NBC Olympics developed software it calls the Olympics Equipment Management System. The software includes modules that manage and integrate the planning, design, sourcing, finance, transportation, warehousing, and inventory-management functions.

For example, when an engineer needs to build a section of a broadcast system, he or she can use the planning module to specify the needed components and electronically create a requisition. Olympics Sourcing then will create and electronically transmit a purchase order to the appropriate vendor. The financial module gives the necessary authorization to issue the requisition and purchase order, and track spending.

When the goods arrive at NBC's locations in the United States or in Sydney, the inventory-management module receives the material and reconciles it with the purchase order. Warehouse workers open the boxes, tag each capital item with an identifying bar code, and enter serial numbers into the information system. This is a critical step, especially when it comes to customs inspections later on, says Yarusavage. "This bar-code system has been very helpful with U.S. and Australian Customs," he notes. "It lets them find any piece they want within a given shipment."

Once an item has been shipped to Australia and received into inventory at the Field Shop or International Broadcast Center, it then can be delivered to its final destination. The bar codes attached to each part will help NBC keep track of items after they leave the Field Shop. Yarusavage says technicians will do periodic sweeps of every site in Sydney with bar-code readers to produce an "integration" or map that shows the location of each item. Having an accurate picture of each piece's location when it's time to ship everything back will speed up the export process and facilitate compliance with both sets of customs regulations, he adds. This system also allows NBC's engineers to locate inventory that is in use in Sydney for emergency redeployment.

Get the Research Right

NBC Olympics' logistics project seems overwhelming in its magnitude and detail. That's why the biggest challenge for his company so far, says Dave Smith of Fritz, has been to maintain the mountain of records needed to satisfy customs authorities in both countries.

There are so very many details to keep track of, Smith and Yarusavage say, that a team approach, a focus on process management, and constant communication between shipper and forwarder have been absolute necessities. "The key to pulling off a project like this is not necessarily knowing everything there is to know," Yarusavage observes. "It's knowing where to get the answer and finding the person who has that answer. If the research is right, then the answer will be right."

Editor's Note: National Geographic magazine also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Olympic Games sites in its August 2000 issue. That article describes how the sites were constructed and the extraordinary measures that were taken to minimize the Games' environmental impact on their surroundings.

Mastering the Art of Advance Planning

George Yarusavage/Director of Technical Logistics, NBC Olympics Inc.