Mississippi State University TV Center Transforms Workflow with farmerswife

The Challenge

The Mississippi State University Television Center is the university’s broadcast television production facility, providing studio and field production services to on- and off-campus clients. Formed in 1989, the center has since expanded into several service lines, including event support, creative scripted and unscripted productions, and traditional studio and control room operations.

To handle the varied workload for its eleven full time staff members, we require an integrated work management system that includes resource allocation, project management, and invoicing tools. For a couple of decades, we used a work management system that wasn’t customized to our specific needs. This product was built for much larger media organizations and contained features that were cumbersome for the small, yet productive, needs of our center. This system did not offer a robust mobile or online option and required a local server to manage the database, which became another headache for our overextended engineering staff. A series of mergers and acquisitions made it increasingly difficult for us to contact the software vendor for support and we felt our needs were not being adequately served. Yet another sale of the company was the breaking point; we needed to find a solution that could be modified to fit our needs as a higher education production facility.

The Solution

The TV Center has used farmerswife for nearly three years. The standup of the platform was incredibly straightforward and the onboarding team was able to make adjustments to suit our specific requirements, including language changes in descriptive categories so we didn’t have to start all over on how we describe center functions. The platform is easily configurable by the user, allowing me to update resource listings,
categories, and rates to meet the changing needs of our clients. It took less than 30 days to bring the software online and roll it out to all users; a remarkably short time given the learning curve normally associated with a resource management platform. farmerswife is a daily necessity for the TV Center. All work orders are generated in the system, deploying crews and equipment for shoots and meetings. Clients are created, quotes are generated, and invoices are sent through the software; our hourly rate charges are automatically handled as part of the work order process, making account management simple. The system prevents double-booking of resources, including people and equipment, ensuring we have who and what we need to meet the client’s expectations.

farmerswife is intuitive enough that I can personally handle the administrative tasks associated with the software; there’s no need to hire another staff member to manage crew bookings. We elected to run the platform on a farmerswife cloud server, rather than on a local server, freeing up engineering time to devote to other activities. farmerswife is priced to fit in our budget and has saved us thousands in staff compensation through the efficiencies the system provides to our operation. We consider farmerswife to be a wise investment, providing a cost-effective solution to the challenges of managing people and equipment.