This is a guest post written by ScheduALL Lead Product Architect Steve Whiting
As the first decade of the 21st century goes into the record books, we see the phrase “On-Demand” getting a lot of play as the operative word for many items that we consume.
Video, Gaming, Shopping, News, Entertainment and Computing are just a few of the current offerings associated with the On-Demand buzzword.
While these examples represent truly automated digital products that are indeed available on demand, other so-called On-Demand items such as labor and services are obviously not available at a moment’s notice. Initiating online chats with humans for support-oriented services can be almost real time, but people cannot just instantly appear at your facility or home to provide hands-on labor-based services. In order to meet the demand for consultive, creative or other complex services, we must coordinate schedules and locations for equipment and/or personnel resources.
If you are a Vendor in the Media and Broadcast world, your challenge is to supply these complex services to your clients when requested. To do this, there may be times when you also become a Consumer of services provided by others. This happens when you need additional resources to support a workload that exceeds internal capacity or when you require specialized resources or services. Coordinating schedules and locations is a daunting job even in the best of situations, but when you add in the variables associated with acquiring external resources, it can be overwhelming.
As a Freelance Vendor or independent contractor, you need to acquire enough work to maintain a full schedule while keeping your primary clients happy. Bailing out on a promised job due to conflicts can do harm to your client relationships.
The On-Demand side of providing these services begins with the ability to verify Vendor availability.
Allowing all of your clients to verify your availability in real-time would be of great benefit. Having an accurate up-to-date view of Vendor availability would greatly improve the scheduling process for your Clients.
I would venture to say that some of the success of Amazon’s On-Demand shopping could be attributed to the fact that users are able to verify product availability before ordering a product. Supply and Demand requires that Demand is able to locate the Supply. Without an On-Demand connection method, Supply and Demand are simply remote islands waiting for a connection. Utilizing an On-Demand method in the Media and Broadcast sector to make this connection converts Supply and Demand into real-time collaboration.
You may have noticed that a few key words keep appearing in these observations. They can be summed up as a phrase to identify the needed solution – Accurately Verify Vendor Availability.
This On-Demand method can be accomplished using ScheduALL’s newest product – AVvA (remember those letters? – though not actually an acronym). AVvA is a browser-based scheduling application available free as a software as service.
AVvA users can share availability in real-time with other AVvA users and with facilities using ScheduALL’s Marketplace community. This is done using a selective Publish and Subscribe method that enables Clients to accurately view and verify their Vendor’s resource availability on their own system as if it were a local resource. Booking requests are made On-Demand locally and update instantly on the Publisher’s schedule.
Publishing of Personnel and/or Equipment resources can be done directly to your selected Clients and/or to our general Marketplace for global visibility. Subscribers see only availability of published resources –details of bookings made by other Subscribers remain confidential to the Publisher.
For more details on scheduling resources On-Demand, please go to www.AVvAnow.com.
