With the wide array of workforce management softwares available, almost all aspects of employee and independent contractor management can become streamlined and centralized. Now that mobile devices and technology tools have become more powerful and mainstream, there are a lot of options to be more efficient with workforce management — which is great news for the AV planners and schedulers who are currently relying on outdated scheduling methods, or even those trying to fit their approach into a industry non-specific software that doesn’t understand their unique needs.

The introduction of a perfect-fit technology solution provides a system of time saving features to AV schedulers and planners — giving them better control over crew management and greater insight into crew and project status. From ensuring that the right person with the necessary skills is on-site when they’re needed, to simplifying approvals, an AV workforce management software (aka crew management software) can do it all.

Utilizing an AV workforce management software to reduce manual administration tasks is easy once you know where to start and which processes you’ll be streamlining. Here are 5 ways AV workforce management software can reduce manual administration tasks and make your life simpler.

1. Cut out endless scheduling coordination emails

Manually drafting and sending back and forth email communications with schedule updates to your workforce can be time consuming.

Inevitably, things will come up where schedules require alterations.The use of workforce management tools can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on these changes as well as prevent any accidental errors that can more easily occur when complicated schedules are being handled manually.

To reduce these manual scheduling and coordination tasks, workforce management software allows you to plug in all of your project’s information quickly and communicate scheduling updates to your AV crew so you don’t have to. In this way, these softwares inherently reduce many of the labor coordination tasks on your plate. This will also reduce frequently asked scheduling questions and scheduling errors.

With the right AV workforce scheduling software, you can replace those endless email chains simply by plugging location, dates, times and notes into your workforce software in order to deliver schedule updates in an easy and consistent format for everyone involved.

2. Simplify crew payout approvals with centralized reporting

An important aspect of AV crew management is ensuring the contractors and your employees are working according to the schedules you’ve set and are being held accountable for their attendance and hours. But doing so can mean going back and forth collecting billable hours, verifying times with your project managers, and more.

By introducing an AV workforce management software with online timesheets and receipt upload fields, your AV workforce is held accountable for updating their own timesheets so you don’t have to.

And because all of your workforce’s time and receipt information is housed in a centralized location, you won’t have to go back and forth between Excel spreadsheets and emails to add up what’s owed. Instead, it’s done for you and you’re able to securely approve (or disapprove) hours at the click of a button.

3. Locate communications instantly

Your contractor didn’t show up to the project site — did you send him his updated schedule? Your lighting technician swears up and down that you agreed to pay him $100 per diem on top of his hourly rate — where is the email confirming this?

As a scheduler, you have a lot of questions to answer to — and a lot of emails to sort through in order to prove you’ve done your due diligence.

An online AV workforce management software allows you to instantly locate every communication you’ve sent, every time you’ve updated rates, and every time the contractor received notification of these changes via a contractor-project timeline.

No more sifting through documents, emails, and spreadsheets to locate and verify this information. An AV workforce software keeps all of these details at your fingertips, ready to show to your client or contractor.

4. Save lists of crew members through “Favorites”

Manually searching through past project files to find who worked on different projects can be time consuming. A company can become immensely more productive by introducing a crew management software so they can reduce manual searches, and easily pull up profiles of crew that performed well on projects in the past.

Saving lists of crew members in your area or those that you’ve worked with before helps keep things organized. This technology solution helps you remember the crew with the skills and availability you need for each project and helps you to schedule them easily — simplifying the process and ensuring nothing is lost to human error.

5. Contract and insure independent contractors

Contracting and insuring AV crew members can be time consuming and involve heaps of paperwork. While not every workforce management software provides planners and schedulers with an easy way to manage these variables, an industry-specific AV crew management software solution will. MertzCrew, for example, facilitates the contracting and insurance so you know everything is properly executed. Simply negotiate and agree to rates and dates with contractors and MertzCrew will handle the paperwork end.

This not only saves you time on the front-loaded tasks that bog down AV projects at the start, it also helps you rest easy knowing your contracts and insurance are in order and your company has done its due diligence in reducing risks.

Key Takeaways

AV workforce management software is a big improvement in increasing operational and productivity efficiency. Having employee and independent contractor information, scheduling and communications tools, and analytic reports at your fingertips allows you to keep your business prepared for demands before they’re even called in and reduces the tasks you’ve always had to manage manually.

MertzCrew was specifically designed to manage AV crews, making it the AV industry go-to for crew management and scheduling. It can significantly change how your company handles its hiring and scheduling processes, adding efficiency and accuracy and reducing timely tasks. For a free live software demo so you can see exactly how the process is streamlined, sign up here.