NIM 7.0 NIM Labs addresses the studio scheduling process with a new set of simple drag-and-drop tools that teams can use to assign people, resources and assets to projects quickly.
Job-centric view
NIM 7.0, a new update to NIM Labs studio management software, addresses the studio scheduling process with a new set of simple drag-and-drop tools that teams can use to assign people and assets to their projects quickly.
"Visibility into a studio's capacity is essential when you're working across a lot of people," said Andrew Sinagra, co-founder of NIM Labs. "NIM 7.0 takes you out of the spreadsheets and is an effective way to visualise who and what is available at any given moment, so your decisions can be made faster and be better informed."
NIM was designed to give studios a complete overview of their performance, from finances to production, so they can accurately measure the health of their organization at any time. NIM 7.0 increases visibility into a studio’s main processes, helping them to stay competitive – on a global scale if necessary.
Redesigned Scheduling UI
User utilisation
The revamped scheduling UI serves as a simpler way to manage users, events, jobs and resources. Users can now drag and drop artists onto jobs, check utilization rates for everything from people to licenses, and rapidly create events with common crews or departments.
"When you don't have the right information in front of you, you can easily waste your time searching for it," Andrew said. "NIM 7.0 puts everything in one place, cutting down on conversations that don't need to happen. Why ask IT how many licenses you have left, when the data is already there? This is a better way to work."
Jobs and Capacity
A new job view offers a detailed look at all events that are associated with specific jobs, allowing producers and heads of production to manage timelines, crew assignments and resource allocation by person or team. This view also gives leaders an up-to-date look at the overall capacity of a department, which can reflect temporary drops while staff members are on holiday, for example. Using this information, users can easily plot out their progress even when working with a global freelancer pool.
To save time, users can now create preset groups or bundles for users, crews and resource combinations that can be quickly added to the schedule, removing the need to reinvent frequently used set-ups on common assignments.
Filter panel
A new filter panel has also been added, so users can build complex filter rules that can be saved or shared with others. This panel has a new level of granularity as well, giving producers more control across the schedule, calendars, job list, contacts and users.
Balancing Users and Resources
Detailed utilization metrics are now accessible in NIM 7.0, allowing teams to view the total utilization of users or resources each day. This information is displayed against each asset's capacity with colour-coded indicators that highlight over- or under-utilization.
NIM 7.0 introduces a robust conflict detection system that helps users define custom conflict scenarios based on user or resource assignments, event status and event limits. When a conflict is detected, the system immediately alerts the user and adds the conflict to the conflicts panel, where it can be managed and resolved.
Users can now import bid line items from an external spreadsheet into their estimate, making it easier to add shot list specifics. As line items are imported, the new UI will automatically flag any issues a user needs to address if they want to bring their data in clean.
Conflict detection
"NIM lets us customize our pipeline in a way other off the shelf products cannot — from the UI to project set-ups," said Lindsey Morrow, Senior Producer at Flawless AI. "Plus, because we can track the estimated vs actual times spent on a task, we can not only keep on schedule for a show, but continually measure and refine our process, which helps us get more efficient every day."
To see how NIM's features work in different parts of an organization, you can visit their Creatives, Producers and Executives pages for more information. Tutorials and feature overviews can also be found at their videos page.
NIM 7.0 is available now and delivered as a virtual machine. Annual licenses are USD 30/month per user and monthly licenses are USD 40/month per user. Annual and monthly licensing can be mixed to cover individual studio demands. nim-labs.com
