THE CHALLENGE
Our network of in-house resources, freelancers and external contributors were mainly coordinated by phone, mail or text message. Once bookings were confirmed, the production team had to note them down in a paper agenda, as well as on a whiteboard situated at the heart of the production office, visible by all the people booked that day.
At the end of the day, our collaborators had to complete a form to confirm the bookings done during the past day. Those forms were used to invoice our clients and our freelancers.
THE SOLUTION
We have been using farmerswife since January 2020 and it has radically changed the global view on the workflow in terms of timeline.
After explaining our way-of-working and undertaking a short setup phase with farmerswife, we introduced a cloud version of farmerswife which offers a range of new tools which we use to organise and follow productions at INS. Within a couple of weeks we passed from a purely analogue way of working to a fully digital schedule that can be shared with all members of our production team and our creative collaborators.
As we work mainly in news gathering with short deadlines, using farmerswife improved our reactivity when bookings are requested in less than an hour. The production teams have a dynamic and visual tool to identify the resources and profiles available. We intend to continue the implementation with our financial teams, allowing us to manage a complete workflow from client request to invoice within the farmerswife environment. A third phase will be to invite all our human resources and freelancers to access the platform and participate in the planning. Last but not least, we will use farmerswife to index our technical equipment and oversee its deployment and maintenance.
THE SUPPORT
Support has always been very accessible and very helpful.
