Office Tracker Success Story
DATV - Dayton Access Television
Improves Editing with Office Tracker Scheduling

DATV (Dayton Access Television) is the non-profit, community television station in Dayton, OH. We provide public access television services to the citizens of Dayton and the surrounding area. We’ve been serving the Dayton community for 30 years and have 6 full-time and 4 part-time staff. Basically, we provide television training and equipment to citizens. We then air their programs on the channel.

Citizens who use our video editing facilities have always had to sign up using the paper calendar method. After they find an available room and date, they would then fill out a request form, give it to a staff member who walked it back to the calendar and manually wrote in their request. Additionally, we have citizens calling and asking if a specific date, room, and time are available. Our staff would then have to get up, walk back to the room where the calendars are located (but a phone isn’t) just to see if that that date, room and time was available. As you can imagine, if it was not available, you could be doing a lot of walking and talking back and forth. In addition, at the end of each year we would manually count up the hours used on each of 6 to 8 calendars for use in our Annual Reports.

Enough was enough! I got on-line and did a search for facilities scheduling, etc. and came across several programs. I download a few demos I found on line and found that each had something I liked, but none of them had everything we needed until I download the Office Tracker demo. As Operations Manager at that time, I researched the product and brought it to the attention of the rest of the staff.

We needed a program that could be easily learned and easily used. We also needed a calendar that could be posted to the web and viewed by community members from the comfort of their own homes. Office Tracker fit our needs perfectly. As one who hates to read documentation, the demo was so intuitive; I just started playing around Office Tracker and had it doing everything we needed it to do. The WebViewer is easy to use and very powerful and we love the reports we can generate from Office Tracker.

Before, we spent at least 5 minutes on the phone helping a member find an available room, time and date. Not any longer. Additionally, we save the time it took for someone internally to hand in an Edit Room or Studio Request form and then walk to another part of the facility to sign them up for a room. The latter doesn’t sound that difficult, but when you have to stop what you’re doing 10 times a day, it gets a bit agonizing. Now we simply take a call or written request for a room and schedule it right from our desk. It literally takes less than 20 seconds.

Not only does it [Office Tracker] save DATV money, but as importantly it saves us time. Concurrently, the time, effort and money it saves our members not having to drive into our facility to sign up for an Edit Suite or Studio is immeasurable. As a community based organization, it’s our mission to serve the citizens of Dayton in the most effective way possible. Office Tracker is one of the best tools for helping us meet that mission.

All 10 employees schedule members for editing and studio usage. Often, we’re busy assisting other members with technical needs. As a result, we have to stop helping them in order to sign someone up for a room. Now not only can people call in their request, they can email their request. This obviously frees up staff to take care of more pressing issues.

The key benefits are: simple; ease of use for staff, easy to understand calendars, powerful interface, and comprehensive and easy to understand reports.

Office Tracker is exactly what we were looking for. Not only does it save a tremendous amount of time in signing people up. It saves us a great deal of time producing our year-end statistics. No more manually entering or manually counting the hours used.

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