Cheqroom

Before I jumped into live audio full-time, I was the musician who couldn’t relax until every cable was neatly run and traveling gear was clearly labeled. Now I help manage $2M in live audio equipment at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. Three main theaters. Over twenty theatrical productions a year. Zero permanent sound systems. Because designing the system is a part of our students’ education. That means our gear never stops moving. So we brought it all into one system with Cheqroom, and it freed up about 80% of my brain power. On Wednesday, November 11 at 12PMET, I’m joining Cheqroom’s Customer Spotlight Series to share: - How we let students see everything while editing only their own reservations. - How custom fields help students filter gear by spec and pull manuals mid-load-in. - How we rolled it out to our MFA students and technical interns, and what they think so far. If you wrangle gear for a school, theatre, or production team, come hang out! And bring your questions 😁 Register here: https://lnkd.in/eGaF-mt8

The light died in the middle of a student's end of year thesis shoot. Someone had reported it three weeks earlier. This one comes up a lot when I talk to campus production teams. The studio is booked for a senior's thesis film. Last scene of the day. Mid-take, a studio light flickers out, and 12 people are standing in the dark. The students go find the equipment manager. She calls the studio technician. Now it's an emergency. He's on a ladder within the hour. He fixes it. Before he goes home, he searches the shop inbox. There it is, from three weeks ago: "light 3 acting weird?" He doesn't even know who sent it. Someone reacted. Nobody tagged maintenance. Nobody ignored it. It just had nowhere to go except an inbox, so the light stayed in use until it failed with a full crew under it. A 5:30 p.m. emergency, for a problem someone reported three weeks earlier. What I see work: whoever spots the problem flags the light in an app, right then. The light can't be booked until it's fixed. The technician gets a repair work order with the light's history and who reported it. So it gets fixed before the next shoot, not in the middle of one. Here's how campus teams keep gear ready: https://lnkd.in/e6fSWDds

The semester ended. The loaner laptops didn't all come back, and the help desk can't say who has the rest. This one comes from campus IT teams. In August, the help desk hands out loaner laptops, tablets, and hotspots for the semester. A form, a signature, a row in a spreadsheet. In December they come back in waves. A few get checked in properly. Most go into a bin behind the desk, to deal with after finals. Laptops without chargers. Hotspots in the wrong bag. A few devices not at all. Meanwhile, the business school borrowed a cart of laptops for orientation week and never quite sent them back. A grad assistant who finished in May still has a laptop next to her name. The spreadsheet says who signed in August. It doesn't say who has the device now. What I see work for campus IT: Each loaner goes out as one kit (laptop, charger, hotspot), scanned to a named person with a due date and automatic reminders. If the charger doesn't come back, the check-in shows it right there. Students reserve a loaner in a self-service portal, so the help desk isn't running a waitlist by email. Laptops live in the same system as the rest of the campus gear, so a loan to another department stays on the record, and devices come back when someone leaves. See how campus IT keeps track of every loaner: https://lnkd.in/e6fSWDds

Budget requests win with numbers, not stories. Before you ask for new gear, know what your department owns, what’s used, and what sits on the shelf.

Your sign-out sheet knows who signed. It doesn’t know what came back. Cheqroom checks every piece back in, so the next student gets a complete kit.

When a report gets lost in an inbox, the repair happens mid-shoot instead of on a quiet Tuesday. With Cheqroom, anyone you allow can flag broken gear from their phone, and it’s pulled from bookings right away.