THE CHALLENGE
The recent growth of our business resulted in a substantial increase in both the volume and scale of projects undertaken. We wanted to be able to look a week, a month or three months down the line and analyze our ability to resource existing projects and service new productions. We have a fantastically dynamic and multi-skilled team in house, who bounce between projects. We needed a system to manage these interlinked resources to ensure we get the most from our talented team and best service for each project.
THE SOLUTION
After a few months of testing to ensure that it was the right fit for us – we rolled farmerswife out team-wide. It is now at the heart of our operational decision-making, production planning, and resource management.
We spent a lot of time testing the system, running scenarios and liaising with farmerswife support to ensure that it could work for us. As a full-service production and post facility with in-house producers, researchers, animators, editors and designers – we needed to be sure that farmerswife met the differing needs of each department and team member.
We use farmerswife as a practical, logistical and strategic tool to resource and manage our day to day production needs but also to plan, project and strategize our resourcing needs for the future.
Before we were using farmerswife we were using a combination of Microsoft Outlook Calendar, spreadsheets, and sticky notes!
farmerswife has proven to be a key decision-making tool for management. The ability to analyze multi-project schedules at a glance has been a real game changer for us. This is something we simply wouldn’t have been able to do without farmerswife – it is difficult to imagine working without it now!
The reporting function has allowed us to provide detailed data to our accounts department, supplying accurate information for our management accounts.
We wanted farmerswife to serve as both an everyday diary system for our production team and a powerful scheduling tool for management. It was vital that we could meet all of these needs with one system, farmerswife has achieved that for us.
Once we established exactly what we wanted farmerswife to achieve for us, we built up a framework within the system to facilitate that. From there, scalability is relatively straightforward – adding resources, projects, and users to meet increasing needs.
THE SUPPORT
farmerswife support are quick to respond, knowledgeable of both the system and industry and able to approach every query with an analytical and problem-solving mindset. The system and its vast array of features can be somewhat daunting at first, the support team helped us to make farmerswife work for us from day one – looking at the needs of our business and shaping our approach to ensure those needs were met.
