THE CHALLENGE
Before farmerswife, we used a range of tools, both free and paid for – from scheduling and budgeting to time reporting and project tracking, we had information in a lot of different places.
As the studio grew rapidly, it became apparent that managing our projects needed to become more focussed and consolidated. It was becoming a huge task to gather project information and get an accurate picture of how any given project was progressing. As we brought in more staff, they had experience of working with various project management tools, and we used that experience to help plan a new workflow and make a decision about how to become more efficient.
THE SOLUTION
We have been using farmerswife for nearly a year, including a few months building out our database and planning the implementation. We use farmerswife to create estimates, schedule in artists and equipment and track time and costs. We export data from farmerswife for our Finance team, who work in a separate system.
We are now more efficient at planning and tracking projects – this has been hugely important as we get busier and busier!
farmerswife has made our process much more transparent. Our producers can quickly see what is happening in terms of artists and can update bids and budgets more quickly. farmerswife is an ongoing project for us – it has made a big difference, but we are continuing to adapt it to our needs and build new reports and all that fun stuff. It is hard to quantify, but the studio continues to grow and farmerswife is a part of that.
The fact that farmerswife can be adapted to the needs of the studio was hugely important for us in making the decision to invest. We needed a tool that would adapt to a range of different ways of working (VFX is very different to brand work, which in turn is different to working with a museum or exhibition space) and farmerswife is certainly adaptable!
THE SUPPORT
The farmerswife team has been great at helping us get set up and then working through the teething troubles of integrating a new system into a busy studio. They continue to offer great support as we ask too many questions!
