2020 CASTING
AGENCY THAT HELPS FILMMAKERS ENGAGE SUPPORTING ACTORS (OR EXTRAS)
THE SUMMARY
Enhancing business-critical payment and artist management processes
1
GOAL
To implement an internal financial system with a custom workflow and deliver additional enhancements to improve business efficiency.
2
PROCESS
In-depth discovery supporting complete re-think of the registration process which led to the implementation of a moderation system.
3
IMPACT
The active user base o the application doubled in a matter of a couple of months, reaching nearly 20K users (by June 2017).
Codescrum inherited my company’s highly customised and complex web application that helps connect extras with production companies in the UK film and TV industry.
In addition to its core tasks, it has a highly integrated customised finance system that allows us to invoice, make payments and generate financial reports.
Although Codescrum were not the original developers of the application, they have been exceptional in its successful development.
ALEX ONG
Senior Product Manager
2020 Casting ltd
THE CHALLENGE
Improving the application's data reporting flexibility by allowing dynamic data input.
1
GOAL
The finance application needed to enable a number of complex operations within various management tasks. To be successful, our work would need to overcome a number of significant challenges, including developing an internal financial system which required a custom workflow that closely matched the unique characteristics of the business.
2020 Casting introduced pioneering functionality such as digital photographs and text messaging systems before they were commonly available. They were now seeking a similarly innovative back-office application.
The application also needed to:
Increase the number of user registrations
Support accurate internal workload analytics
Simplify the current booking workflow and information tracking
Save time in helping film-makers choose and book extras for productions
2
PROCESS
From the outset, we invested time in making sure we gained a deep understanding of the business model and its ways of working to ensure our future solution was based on solid insights and foundations.
We investigated key concepts, even detailing the business process ourselves to make sure we understood precisely the challenge ahead. This approach proved invaluable when we began designing a solution that encompassed the workflow and which also took into account potential user errors that could be made along the journey. It also enabled us to roll back certain steps if necessary and made them open to corrections.
To increase the number of registered users we took baseline measures of the operation. A great deal of data was needed to create the user accounts because of the nature of the business. After reviewing the registration process, we decided it required a rethink to make it more streamlined and introduced a moderation system that was able to check registrants before their publication.
We were able to take the majority of workload analytics from the database itself, but we also integrated a software called Keen.io which queries the data in an additional way and helps generate customised reports easily.
Quickly communicating artiste selection to customers is a vital task for business users. This was mainly achieved using PDFs that the application generated. We discussed faster, more efficient alternatives and then implemented a web based form to share this information.
Finally, we looked at upgrading other areas of the application were designed to enhance productivity. This resulted in us simplifying the booking workflow to reduce training requirements and improve employee onboarding.
3
IMPACT
Casting 2020 adopted the platform as the main point of control for essential business activities, and the financial module quickly overtook their previous accounting system, making it far easier to manage its balances.
The user registration process was streamlined to enable a completely web-based application process which allowed people to pause their registration at any point and come back later. The active user base doubled in a matter of a couple of months.
The workload analytics implementation now uses Keen.io, enabling administrators to set their own filters and queries for computing efficiency and turnover of specific projects, people and time periods.
Customers now receive interactive books detailing artiste selection instead of PDFs sent by email. The time it takes to communicate selection decisions has been cut almost tenfold.
The redesigned application workflow simplifies communication between users and internal staff, as well as organizing the work into more manageable chunks while offering a complete historical list of the decisions made. This has significantly reduced errors and improved efficiency when coordinating large projects.
CLIENT LOCATION
London, UK
TEAM
3 Codescrumers
TIMELINE
January 2015 - Current
We implemented an internal financial system with custom workflow and deliver additional enhancements to improve business efficiency.
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