Creative Production Management

Overview

Motivation

Some clients want to produce some creative materials for print or online media which are designed by an in-house team of graphics designers. Some commercials are produced by suppliers. In future, sponsored dramas may also be produced by outsourcing to third parties.
This module will manage the estimates, operations and record revenue for such tasks.

Clients:

• Retainer client: monthly revenue is received against a fixed number of creatives at a defined card rate and client-specific discount. If, in a certain month, additional creatives need to be produced, the client will be charged based on that card rate and discount.
• Ad hoc client: a negotiated amount will be charged for the required number of creative materials produced.

Estimate Preparation:

• A task will be created in this module. Then there will be an option to create a budget estimation for this task.
• Predefined fields for recording cost breakdown (for example, for drama/commercial production, remuneration of actor/actress, director, location charge, etc.)
• Any new type of cost can also be recorded
• The estimate may be received from the supplier as well
• This estimate has to be approved by higher officials through the system and also clients (over email)

Work order / task assignment

• If the material is produced by a supplier, a work order will be generated based on a client approved estimate. Bills will be checked by accounts against this work order.
• If the task is assigned to an in-house team, the Client Service officer will see the current load of all creative designers in the dashboard and select someone for assignment accordingly. CS will also set a deadline for delivery. If the deadline is missed, it will be shown with different color in the dashboard.

Archiving Creative Materials

• When the creative material is received from the designer, the Client Service officer will archive it by adding metadata (e. G., client, brand, campaign name, commercial name, etc.). They can also rate creative designs (may be out of 1 to 5).
• Any designer can search through this archive to have reference examples while designing a new one.

Progress Tracking and Performance Evaluation

• The management may track progress of work from a dashboard where task assignment and progresses (deadline, receiving date) are shown. The tasks with imminent deadline and those which missed deadlines will be shown with different color.

• Management or delegation can also assess performance of individual designers based on the number of designs created and ratings achieved for designs.

Modules:

• user: content creator, client (registration), manager
• payments: monthly (defined card + discount) or task based (negotiated amount) payment with transaction id and all other payment related info.
• task management: task assignment, progress tracking, deadlines
• cost estimation (approval via email)
• order: form
• finance
• archive management, rating
• performance evaluation.

Django setup

• install python virtual environment

    pip install virtualenv

• create a virtual environment

    virtualenv ENV

• activate the virtual environment

    ENV\Scripts\activate

• install dependencies

    pip install --upgrade pip
    pip install -r requirements.txt

• run the server

    python manage.py runserver

• create a superuser (this is required to access the admin panel)

    python manage.py createsuperuser