AV companies face an interesting dilemma in 2016: companies in industries all around them are adopting SaaS tools to optimize their projects and workloads while gaining better efficiency, while AV companies themselves struggle to find a SaaS solution that can fit their processes well enough to merit a switch from the disjointed project management tools they’ve used for decades.

Process improvements are the key to establishing a workflow that improves your AV team’s productivity and helps your team deliver exceptional work for clients.

But before you can make any crew management process improvements, your organization needs to identify where inefficiencies exist, what possible solutions may fill them, and how to get the rest of your team on board with these new changes.

It’s easy to cling to an AV project planning process that has been with your organization since its start -- your employees are used to it and it works (for the most part) -- but it’s important to consider whether your process is still serving your company as well as it could.

Strategic workforce planning is all about having the right crew members in the right place, at the right time, and at the right cost. It’s a process that involves internal coordination and communication within your AV team, effective crew member selection and scheduling, and working with crew members to get them on board and up to speed quickly.

Many industries utilize field service softwares as a solution for managing mobile workforces and widespread resources. There are many benefits to doing so, from improving communication and tracking to organizing your internal management processes into one streamlined system.  

Occasionally, before you even realize it, AV labor costs can spin out of control. By the time this happens, it’s too late to fix the problem. In order to stay on-budget, AV schedulers and planners need to take proactive measures when managing per-project labor costs. While this is often easier said than done, introducing an online platform that tracks labor costs is one of the easiest ways to manage budgets accurately, effectively, and without increasing your workload. Below are just a few of the ways an AV crew management tool can help you manage AV labor costs on any project, before costs get out of hand.

Changing project needs can easily and quickly cause AV project costs to increase beyond what was originally budgeted. Perhaps a client requested equipment that was outside of the original scope and required the addition of skilled crew members, or perhaps the client bumped up the event forcing you to add more labor to the project in order to meet your deadline. In either case, while Project Managers and Account Executives can’t avoid these scenarios, they can improve how they monitor and attempt to stay on budget by investing in an expense management software that will give them better project status and cost insights.

The dreaded AV scheduling spreadsheet. It’s an AV scheduler best friend and their worst enemy. It contains all of the information you need to keep your project on track, on budget, and on time, helping you manage all of your crew management processes. But, as handy a tool as it is, it’s also outdated. While your Excel scheduling spreadsheet may keep your AV project on track, it also may stagger behind industry trends and technological advancements in the business world that could improve your scheduling process and bring you even better insights.

Live events are make or break. Your AV team and crew gets one chance to either make it all go right the first time or miss the mark. Adding to the challenge, live events can be unpredictable with deadlines and scopes that are constantly moving. While these obstacles can be hard to overcome, you can defeat them and set your live event up for success with careful AV crew scheduling, planning, management, and preparation.

Coordinating a group of people to do anything can be hectic -- especially in the world of AV. Between communications, multiple databases, availability, and evolving project requirements, simply scheduling your crew for a project can cost you a substantial amount of time and money. Fortunately, the addition of a crew scheduling and management software can alleviate many of these scheduling tasks and help you manage your AV crew with greater ease. When introducing a crew scheduling software designed specifically for AV projects, there are a few stand-out features you should expect to find that will instantly take the stress out of crew coordination and scheduling.