The Farm Group Marks Successful Decade Of Business Operations Based On ScheduALL

ScheduALL has announced that The Farm Group, one of London's leading independent film and television post-production houses, has reached a key milestone: ten years of continuous operation based on the ScheduALL broadcast and operations management software system.
The Farm Group is renowned for its post-production work on high-visibility programmes such as 'The X Factor' and many other top-rated TV programmes.
David Klafkowski, Technical Director and a founding member of The Farm, said: "ScheduALL is absolutely essential to our business. With five separate facilities and almost 200 employees, our operation has become very complex. ScheduALL enables us to juggle resources, equipment, rooms, and media quickly in the most efficient and profitable manner possible."
Soon after The Farm's founding in 1998, company managers realised they needed to automate their paper-based systems for managing booking, scheduling, tracking and invoicing of client projects.
As a very young company, The Farm's transition from a paper-based tracking system to ScheduALL enabled it to work from a clean slate and establish workflows that drive operations to this day.
Currently, The Farm's 15 bookings managers use ScheduALL to manage and track operations for 50 edit suites, three grading studios, nine audio studios, four track-laying rooms, and a range of other facilities operating out of five locations - four in Soho, central London and one in Bristol.
Not only does the system prevent double-booking and ensure the most effective allocation of all of the company's resources, but project data entered into the system at the booking and scheduling phase is captured for use throughout the entire project workflow, including final invoice creation once the job is complete - providing a true view of the project lifecycle.
In addition, The Farm has taken advantage of ScheduALL's modular approach, which has allowed the system to grow with the company. The Farm currently uses a host of modules including Quotes Manager, which the company uses for budget forecasting and business planning; Invoicing; Rental & Shipping; and Library Management.
The Farm is in the process of implementing ScheduALL Media Manager module, which will enable the company to organise and track its physical and digital media assets seamlessly for each client and project.
Klafkowski said: "Although the industry is steadily moving to file-based workflows, there is still a huge volume of tape to be tracked and managed in an operation the size of ours. 'The X Factor' alone generates an astounding quantity of tape for each episode. We use ScheduALL to prompt an automatic creation of a file structure on our storage network for all media related to particular jobs. This gives our project managers centralised access to location information about every tape, file, and piece of media."
Joel Ledlow, CEO of ScheduALL, said: "As the global economy struggles, media companies face the challenges to streamline their business, improve and/or maintain profit margins, and operate as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.
"The Farm is a stellar example of how ScheduALL helps organisations run a 'lean' operation by reducing potential waste, maximising the productivity of its resources and improving financial visibility.
Further information is available at: www.scheduall.com.
(KMcA)