Optimising InFocus Film School's Scheduling with Timetabler
InFocus Film School, founded in 2010, is an independent film school based in Canada who provide education in film and entertainment arts. They have since become Vancouver’s top cinematic arts training institution, and offer diploma and certificate programs in film production, 3D animation, visual effects, screenwriting and digital graphic design. All their programs are currently delivered from their campus based in Gastown, Vancouver, with the aim of expanding their estate over the coming years.
In Focus had been using spreadsheets to create schedules for each of their cohorts, however this had some drawbacks in that the approach was not scalable to meet their growth demands and could not easily highlight any clashes between resources such as rooms and staff.
InFocus needed to acquire a cloud-based timetabling solution that could be used by their scheduling team and academic staff to easily produce clash-free schedules, view their timetables and utilise reports to optimise elements of their curriculum delivery. Their main requirements included the ability to visualise timetables for different resources, such as rooms and cohorts, provide alerts to any resource clashes. In addition, they needed to publish timetables online with external calendar integration, and view utilisation metrics for rooms and other resources.
After an initial consultation in April 2020 EventMAP provided its Timetabler software to meet their scheduling and timetabling needs, along with the requirements they had previously demanded. InFocus proceeded to use the software during an evaluation period to get a better understanding of how the application worked, and after several meetings to look closer at the intricacies of their scheduling process, they made the purchase of Timetabler.
The initial users will be their timetabling team and academic staff, with the prospect of students being invited to use the application as their timetable portal and information source in the future.
The software has enabled them to scale their operations moving forward, including the ability to visualise their resource structure to see a variety of different timetables, with all the scheduling functionality, and ease of use like being able to move events by dragging and resizing on the calendar, with the added value of the decision support system to highlight clashes or constraint violations. It has also given them the ability to future proof the access to the system and support various third-party integrations including Google/Outlook calendar synchronisation and Moodle. This project also highlights the reciprocal “partnership” type relationship which EventMAP have with clients. As In Focus had some very valuable ideas in terms of extending the range of interactive editing tools for manual scheduling and decision support. Improving the overall power of this aspect of the scheduling/planning process and operational requirements in intuitive and quick/easy ways. which will benefit the software and all current and future users of Timetabler.
