ZOO Digital Squeezes Additional Profitability Out Of Every Project With ScheduALL

ZOO Digital Group, an international digital media producer serving the film, entertainment and game development industries, has a powerful new ally in its efforts to operate at maximum profitability: the ScheduALL enterprise resource management system.
ScheduALL enables ZOO to capture, access and analyse critical cost information at every point in the life of a project, ensuring that each proceeds efficiently and on budget.
With a client base anchored by the major Hollywood studios, ZOO produces DVDs and Blu-ray disks for the full range of movies and entertainment, games and educational programmes.
The recent acquisition of Scope Seven, a media production and design company based in the UK, meant that ZOO would be able to offer clients turnkey production services in addition to custom software solutions. As a result, ZOO's home-grown project management and tracking system had become inadequate for costing up to 200 projects every month, many of which are highly complex and must be localised in multiple languages.
Duncan Wain, COO of ZOO Digital, said: "Since Scope Seven is a public company, we needed better, more accurate data to support financial reports to shareholders. We had to get a better handle on all of the data necessary for job costing, resource management and capacity analysis, not just for shareholder accountability, but to help us operate more profitably."
After reviewing a host of potential solutions, ZOO chose ScheduALL as its new enterprise system to consolidate and manage all project cost data as well as track and manage media assets. ScheduALL enables managers to capture and cost every aspect of a project involving multiple engineers and designers working in the US and the UK and requiring localisation for many different markets.
Managers can use running against the originally quoted price for a job - a critical requirement since ZOO is pioneering many new design and production capabilities for which there is no pricing precedent. ZOO is currently implementing fucntionality that will enable ScheduALL to roll up cost data from 16 project categories and import it into the accounting system, where the data can feed into quarterly reports to shareholders on the fiscal health of the company.
Wain said: "At the end of the day, our business is all about maintaining our margins as our clients continue to go into cost-cutting mode. ScheduALL didn't overpromise technologies they didn't have available, unlike other vendors, and we knew they would play a critical role in our ability to approximately price each project to ensure maximum profitability.
"With the push of a button, I can get an instant picture of how each project is doing against its budget and we can make adjustments accordingly, or I can get a full snapshot of the entire company's performance."
Further information is available at: www.scheduall.com.
(KMcA/BMcC)