Summary
ShowMgr considers Elements to be the "Ingredients" that make up any ShowMgr Order. They fall into four basic groups: Resources, Assets, Facilities, and Services. This article walks through the definitions of each Element
Definitions of Elements
Resources are anything with a heartbeat. This is anyone who can perform work. Resources can be your full-time staff, part-time staff, freelancers, interns, vendor contacts, or customer contacts. Basically, anyone needing an assignment to be tracked.
Assets are typically categorized as the equipment used on the Order. These are the cameras, computers, boom mics, microphones, etc. Assets can either be equipment that is barcoded (serialized) or equipment that comes from a bin (non-serialized). Both owned and rented equipment can be tracked in the software. It is also common for digital assets such as software licenses or media files to be tracked as an asset as well. It's also important to remember that only serialized SKUs will map to the ShowMgr Asset Record. Any non-serialized SKU will not map.
Facilities are typically all spaces that can be occupied. These are commonly a conference room, a studio, a stage, or an edit bay. Common spaces like hallways, bathrooms, transmission lines, or elevators and even mobile locations such as a venue, a mobile unit/truck, or an address can also be tracked as facilities.
Services are all "other" elements that are not considered to be a person, a place, or a thing. Commonly, outsourced work is tracked as a service. A typical example of a service would be production security or craft services. Atypical services could be any service or company that you would "outsource" work to be completed for a production . (Examples of this could be: specialty companies that you hire to perform specific types of work that you either do not offer "in house" or when you are at maximum capacity and require additional resources (often you will see Editing , Marketing, Creative and many other "Outsourced" functions.)
Elements can be also categorized as either a generic or specific. Generic elements are the parent of specific elements, this is a way to group a set of elements together by a common theme. This allows users to plan without committing to a specific individual or room but build the list of assignments needing completion at some point. In the case of Resources, the generic element would be a person’s position, in the case of Facilities, the generic element would be a facility type, and in the case of Assets, the generic element would be its SKU.
Elements can be scheduled individually or can be grouped together for easier, faster scheduling into Packages or Bundles.