For more than a year, the pandemic has closed offices and forced employees to work from home. In the process, broadcasters and media companies are required to change the way they handle the details of their operations, from adjusting crew tracking to reworking the billing and invoicing process.
As employees work remotely, managing and coordinating physical assets such as facilities, locations and equipment becomes an increasingly complex task. This causes issues managing the most important aspect of the media creation process, the people. Managing staff and understanding what individuals are doing, when they are doing it and why the work is delayed, is virtually impossible while working remotely.
Physical assets aside, effective management is key to allowing an organization to interact among disparate and overlapping timelines. Optimizing profits means companies need to see costs and calculate margins accurately across the platform. Distributing content and understanding the status of content you already have in return, yields revenue.
If ever there was a time to streamline operations, this is it.
Resource management solutions allow companies to track scheduling, crewing, physical and digital assets, billing and invoicing, all in one platform. Companies can decide how many users have access to the system and a user interface can be created to be specific to each user. To facilitate remote work, the best of these solutions are cloud based, secure and available in any browser on any device.
Broadcasters and media companies can have their own IT teams implement controls to allow users into the resource management system’s network from off-site. By using the cloud, users access their accounts whenever they need, wherever they are with a single sign-on, providing them constant access to schedules, job status and requests.
As vaccine rollouts continue and employers and employees begin to return to the office, the same tools and structures making remote working successful are used to provide organization to in-person planning meetings and job scope briefings. Nothing needs to change, the tools and workflows are improved and continue to evolve as conditions change. This drives full process automation and integration to the whole organization.
Overall, resource management systems streamline the operation of broadcasters and media companies, whether working remote or on-site. With a system in place, companies get a clear image of what their business is doing, the impact of their decisions and experience smoother communication with their staff. No matter if they are working from their company’s office or their dining room table.
Greg Dolan is chief commercial officer for Xytech.
