Part 9: Crew Management and Labor Booking Training Video (8:45)
https://vimeo.com/672031837
Transcript
In Propared you can also manage your crew needs, including estimating initial labour budgets, booking your calls, tracking crew conflicts and hours, and sharing crew schedules.
First we’re going to go to the Resources screen and navigate to the tab called Positions.
This is a setup screen and these positions are meant to reflect your standard crew positions that you will assign to bookings or labour lines.
Let’s go ahead and create a new Position by clicking the new Resource button and selecting position.
Lets add the position Carpenter
Each position can be assigned a source which would be the company providing the labour. This can be your own organization, or a company you contract with. This list pulls from the Organizations Contacts. For this example the crew is being provided by my own company, the Helleuey Theatre.
You can also add a Department this position is apart of.
This is part of the Scenic
Next we’ll add a default rate. This can be calculated as an hourly or a flat rate per call. We’ll put 40$ an hour.
Next we can specify an Overtime Ruleset. Rulesets are established in the settings screen and you can make as many rulesets as you want. Lets go the the Settings Screen now and look at Rulesets. Rulesets are in the Preferences Tab Owners and Admin access type are the only ones that can access this tab.
Here on the right you will see the rulesets. Propared automatically creates a default ruleset with is an overtime multiplier of 1.5 times regular pay, and it starts calculating after 8 hour of regular time.You can add a new ruleset by clicking the add button. If you create a new ruleset you will be able to delete the default one, however it is required to always have at least one ruleset. In the future, we will probably be adding more options to Rulesets.
Lets go back and add a few more positions now. (Resources>Positions)
Crew Chief 55$/hr
Electrician 40$/hr
So now that we have some positions, lets pop over to the Timeline screen
Lets create a New Event for the Lion Queen called Load In
Let’s start with creating the Event, enter the name Load-In and add a Date, Time, and Location
June 20th 10am start for 8 hours at the Main Stage
In the Crew Management section lets click the Add Labour Line button.
Labour Lines are objects that allow you to quickly populate the crew needs for a specific event. Such as for Load in Day. We think we will need 4 Carpenters and 2 Electricians. At this point we may not be worried about who exactly will be filling these positions, we might just be wanting to see the financial implications of these specific crew needs. So when I make a labour line in the TImeline and indicate a position and quantity, Propared is also populating our Labour Budget which will aggregate automatically in the Requirements screen under the Labour Tab.
Now we can select a position we wish to create a labour line for. Let’s select our stagehand and then let’s add a 4 next to it, indicating we will want to have 4 stagehands on this event.
You can see in the table there is now a wrench icon, indicating that this event has associated labour lines.
Let’s add a second Labour Line and select the Crew Chief and put in 1.
So, what we have done is indicated that for this call we will need 5 people, 4 stagehands and 1 Crew Chief.
Now, say I have labour lines created in multiple events across multiple projects. All of these Labour Lines are aggregated in a new tab in the Requirements Screen called “Labour”. Here, you can see all of our labour lines, the event and position that each are associated with, and the total cost for each using the default rates and rulesets for each position along with the duration of the event.
In the details, I can adjust the rate for this labour line. If you adjust the rate here, you can always go back to the default position rate by clicking this icon.
You can also adjustment the number of hours that are used to calculate the cost in case there’s an unpaid meal break or you need to add some extra hours for budgeting purposes.
For example this event has a duration of 8 hours, but for our financials we want to assume it will go over and actually be a 9 hour call. I can add an additional hour here to increase the calculation to be for 9 hours.
Below that you’ll see the Standard and OT cost breakdowns.
You can also create new labour lines straight from this screen if you find that easier. Anything you create or change here will be reflected in the timeline.
This workflow allows you to build out estimated budgets for labour quickly. As you continue to make changes in the timeline, for instance, if we update the dates or times for an event, it will automatically be reflected in the costs of the labour lines.
As in other screens you can group the Labour Lines by a variety of things to see aggregated cost estimates.
So, say we are in charge of booking our own crew and we are ready to start scheduling out the people that will be filling each of these positions. Let’s go back to the timeline and our Load in Event and click the “Enable Crew Bookings” button. This will automatically generate booking slots for each position with the quantities we laid out in the labour lines.
So in this example, we’ve created 5 total slots – 4 stagehands and 1 Crew Chief. If I add or remove crew bookings, the new totals will be reflected in the labour line. so, say I want to remove one of these slots as I only need 3 stagehands now. You will see the total number needed in the labour line is updated. Over in the requirements screen you will see that it is also updated in both the number of crew needed and the financials.
Now you can see that we can select a Status for this Booking Slot (None, Confirmed or Tentative.,) The position is auto-selected, and I can select The Name of the person filling this position. Let’s select Lee Westy, is our Crew Chief. We know that he is confirmed, so lets select confirmed status.
Now in the Stagehand slots lets add the name of someone we have reached out to
Jenny Gibbs. We can mark this slot as tentative.
I can also go to the Crew Bookings tab at the top of the Timeline screen to manage all of my bookings together. I can filter by status to just see the slots I still need to confirm or fill. I can also Group by Event.
I can also create new booking slots from this tab as well. If I create a new Booking, I would also need to select the Project and the Event from the Timeline, and again, any changes here will be automatically updating our budget at the same time.
For instance, occasionally, one specific crew member will need to have a different time from the others. In the Crew Bookings tab I can adjust the specific crew booking timeframe, and our financials in the Requirements Screen will also update, ensuring that everything stays up to date.
So let’s add a new Booking slot to the Load-in , It will pull over the times from the Event, I can add in the Position and the Contact.
As you fill out your bookings Propared will also automatically add them to your project’s team.
Propared will automatically check for conflicts across all booking in this and other Projects. If there’s an overlap, you’ll see a conflict icon. We can simulate this by adding Jenny to this exact same call. Now you can see the conflict icon and if you hover over it you will see the conflicting Booking and the Event.
So, Crew Bookings can appear in Production Books if you want. Let’s look at a Production Book’s settings.
If you don’t want Bookings to appear in a particular Schedule, you can toggle off the Include Crew option for the Schedule Page. You can also choose to only show Confirmed Bookings. If this is turned off, Tentative and unbooked slots will show up as well.
