Still Moving Media

From chaos to clarity – How a busy production company solved double bookings and messy 

About Still Moving Media

Still Moving Media crafts still & moving content for commercials, music videos, documentaries, branded media and campaigns for some of the worlds most recognizable brands.

Challenge

As the Head of Studio at Still Moving Media, Nathan Ryan has his hands full, managing 1,200 assets and thousands of accessories while ensuring all of the crew and studio equipment is ready for hundreds of film and photo shoots each year.

It was clear that their old, cobbled-together system was no longer working.

“It was chaos,” says Nathan. “It was Excel sheets. It was Word documents. It was just any way we could get information written down, but there was no formal structure.”

“Things were getting missed, items were getting lost, items were getting forgotten, and people were double booking equipment.”

It was all of the double bookings that led Nathan to look for a better solution.

“The number one reason why we were originally looking for an asset management system, was because we had multiple shoots happening, too much equipment to manage in one place, and therefore experiencing problems such as double bookings or things getting lost or things getting forgotten.”

He found that when he signed up for Reftab.

“Reftab saves so much time. It removed the room for error. Now it’s such an easy platform that it’s solved so many problems. Problems that we weren’t even planning on solving using Reftab originally.”

Streamlining Their Asset Management System with Reftab

With upwards of a half dozen film and photo shoots a week, he turned to Reftab’s user request portal to build a streamlined check-in and check-out system for the team.

“We have individual accounts for all of the members in the company. So if you’re on the film team, you would have your own account with your name. And then, we added a custom tag on all of the reservations to specify which team you were part of. So what it meant is if you were working on a film shoot or a film and photography shoot where both teams are going out, one person could do the film reservation under their name, but specify for film, one person could do the photography one specifying it’s under their name. So we found that people started to pay a lot more attention to looking after the equipment.”

In addition to the increased accountability, the ability to create and check in and out “kits” in Reftab removed a lot of friction and human error. For instance, Nathan created specific camera package kits with all of the gear and accessories that someone would need for a specific type of shoot.

“The reservations check-in check-out system as well the ability for our team to all have their own accounts and to be able to just go into a really user-friendly portal, kind of like a shopping cart on Amazon, and add what they want and then reserve it or check it out instantly is a huge appeal.”

It also reduced the chance of someone forgetting an important part due to being in a rush or having a quick deadline.

“Deadlines can be really tight sometimes on preparing equipment,” says Nathan. “So having it all packaged up as one thing made it really easy for the team at the front end to pick their kit out before the shoot. But, it also made it really easy for the studio technicians to get that kit package together because it was already pre-built lists.”

Gaining Clarity and Peace of Mind with Reftab Custom Reports

Before they switched to Reftab, Nathan and his team would spend a ton of time doing inventory and creating manual reports around asset and equipment usage.

Fast forward to now, he has custom reports that he set up in Reftab once, which now run automatically.

“Things like using the data to fill certain reports, suddenly that’s pretty much automated. I don’t even have to think about that.”

He relies the most on two custom reports he built, one for lifetime loans and another for monthly studio and equipment usage.

“I report up to the company owner, who ultimately is the main stakeholder financially within the business and is also the person who has to sign off our annual budgets on where we invest back into the equipment and the studios,” says Nathan. “So, I provide him every month with a monthly studio and equipment report, which has how many shoots we had based on Reftab’s data. It tells us how many items are working, how many items need to be repaired, and how many are in repair, and we also have custom fields in Reftab to state the value of the equipment and the cost of repair when things need fixing. So that’s all generated automatically.

And then we also generate a lifetime loans report, which tells us how many times an asset has been checked out in its lifetime. And we cross reference that with the previous month. So from that data, we can say this item has been used this many times this month. This is an increase by whatever percentage from the last month or across the year.”

Turning Their Asset Data into a Competitive Advantage

“It’s [Reftab] completely changed how we operate as a business,” says Nathan. “It’s allowed us to launch a sister business with ease just because everything was already there.

Because of the systems they have built, they were able to launch a separate equipment rental business.

“Reason being that we had accumulated so much equipment over seven years running as a production company that we realized we were better equipped than some of the local kit rental houses. Since we had Reftab, the team, and expertise in place, it meant that it required very little effort for us to start making our kits available for other people.”

Reftab as a Partner

“If you need a way to track a lot of equipment, you need a tool to be able to do that,” says Nathan. “And for me, Reftab has done that and more. It’s allowed me to see what equipment is being used, see what reservations are coming up, and assign accountability for that equipment as it goes in and out of the studios. And finally, the reporting on it means that I can get live data that’s accurate and just really handy to save me time in my job and make my team’s life easier.”

Not to mention, whenever Nathan needs help with anything in either business, he knows that he’ll always get top-notch support from the team.

“The team at Reftab has been really supportive. Every time I drop them an email, they’ll be back within 48 hours. And normally with an amazing solution. You can ask ’em anything, and they’ll sort it out for you, which is great.”

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