Joel Ledlow, CEO, ScheduALL
My life and exercise serving “on the road” affords great opportunity to learn from so many of you. As a student I am confused that this concept of working together is neither new, nor remedied with innovations that advance our growing cause. We have in fact been talking about the ability to integrate, interoperate and collaborate in real time for decades. From SMPTE, Broadcast Summits, to ISOG, the question of how broadcasters and vendors could self provision and manage resources collaboratively across the supply chain eliminating stale rate cards, outdated availability and enabling you the consumer to source the best possible relationship for the best value on any given project appear to be the stuff dreams are made of.
Can we not imagine the ability for a broadcaster to have their supplier network provide up-to-the-second availability of their resources from their core operations system readily available for immediate booking – this means satellite, terrestrial, trucks, freelancers, equipment rentals et al? Can we embrace the financial value of a wider visibility of suppliers for any given project? Is it foreseeable to have these options tailored with great granularity presented singularly to one customer with my unique predefined rate card AND include up-to-the-minute updates on availability and price changes?
Are we as an industry prepared to enable this collaborative capability and to seize the possibilities set before us? Increased visibility on assets, improved time management sourcing the right resource, AND an entire universe of global assets at your disposal to complete a given job or event on time and under budget is a panacea we have so longed for.
As a service provider, imagine if I could share my availability to both an individual customer, or to a worldwide marketplace of consumers who find me and subscribe to what it is I am selling. Imagine how many new clients I could cultivate. Imagine how much more competitive I could become. Again with the ability to share only what I want, to who I want and with client specific rate cards. The potential is truly mind blowing.
The very question we must ask ourselves is not IF this capability is possible, but when… and ScheduALL, a 22 year veteran of the media and broadcast community managing the world’s global broadcast operations and transmissions, is proud to be presenting solutions to this decade’s long quest.
We give you ERMa – Enterprise Resource Management application. ERMa is an adapter allowing any ScheduALL system to opt-in, to interact, share and book resources with any other ScheduALL system in real time. This means leading satellite and terrestrial providers can work seamlessly with the leading broadcasters for real time transmission bookings. Same with Rental houses working with in real time with truck companies for event preparation and execution. Same with Crews – anyone with a ScheduALL system and the ERMa adapter can link up and share as little or as much as their inventory, when they like for rates they require ALL in real time and ALL with up to the minute pricing.
ScheduALL is also proud to introduce AVvA – a free SaaS-based browser agnostic scheduling platform for anyone who does not own a core ScheduALL system. Granted, AVvA does not possess the deep business intelligence of ScheduALL, but AVvA does provide robust scheduling functionality with a kicker…
AVvA enables Freelancers, small truck companies and equipment providers to make their resource inventory available within the AVvANow marketplace and they can receive quotes request or actual bookings for events in real time from ERMa users or even other AVvA members. Not much use to pay big money to be posted on a passive directory anymore. With AVvA. collaboration comes alive – work on projects you want at rates you set all in real time. In case you are wondering – yes AVvA will integrate with Outlook and you can easily manage your bookings from your PDA / Mobile device.
In closing, we must recognize the fear of the unknown and understand our future relevance to the whole. During turbulent times it is the courageous who find smart ways to navigate the troubled turn and prepare for the acceleration of the straight away yet to come. The unbridled opportunity available to us should we begin the process of working more closely together, accelerating workflows and advancing content creation to distribution timelines is truly inspiring, but this means we must tamp down our anxiety and focus on the solutions that will drive our businesses to this very real next level. I hope that what I have been able to share helps move us from the mere dialogue of want and whiteboard and arouses each of us to explore the potential of what is now in front of each of us – Our future is so very bright should we have courage enough to seize it.
I wish you all a prosperous 2011 and invite you to watch our “Year in Review Webinar” on how to prepare for future success.
