Event organization and planning is a non-linear and often enough chaotic and intense task. 7D-Live covers all aspects of an event production and gives all parties involved a 360 degrees view of the progress, the history, outlook and the forecast.
7D-Live hosts all information and allows you as the administrator and event owner to distribute and assign it as per the structure and policies of your organisation.
All users are organized in customizable event roles: Attendees, Talent, Clients, Sponsors, Exhibitors, Suppliers and finally your own organisation. Based on these classifications you can specify event roles and responsibilities.
The information shared with individual roles and positions is defined by the customised rights you as the administrator assigned to those.
The following screenshots are based on an administrator role with access to everything for the purpose of showing the full capability of the platform.
Event Setup
Upon logging in as a subscriber of 7D-Live you see the main dashboard with all your events, finished, ongoing, upcoming and planned/pitched. You get an overview and access single events, your contact database, calendar, notifications as well as administrative tools like your company’s price book and 7D-Live subscription.
From here you either set up a new event or select an existing one.
The event’s dashboard gives you an immediate overview on progress, status, and all relevant aspects to your planning, operation and controlling.
General Data & Production Planning
The production data includes and maintains the basic information of your event, dates, locations, event owners, languages, attendee-, sponsor-, exhibitor-categories as well as specific event features. Those are entered at the very start of the event planning by the event owner and can be amended down the road in case of changing parameters. This constitutes the top line information of your event.
As you go along the planning process you assign, manage, and maintain more specific planning dates which are structured in five production phases:
Planning - Setup - Rehearsal - Show - Wrap Up. As a first step you are assigning work to be done (main items), tasks (more detailed steps) and memos (managing the forementioned).
Venues
Under Venues you can add and manage the individual venues of your event. You allocate planning data, access, sponsor, and exhibitor rights and define features which are required for each venue to fulfil the event brief. As venue information you enter throughout your work with 7D-Live is saved in the database you can as well call up data from previous events in the venue and make your entered information available future events there. for one event is not lost; you can reuse it for another event!
As you are digging deeper into the venues you can develop production plans per venue in the same way you plan the overall production under general.
Rehearsal
As the project owner you might have assigned the next steps already to your team. First step when it comes to the operative aspects of your event, you plan and maintain schedules, starting with rehearsal timings. Rehearsals are structured by venue and day. If you already entered the event agenda and preliminary running order (see Agenda & Running Order) each rehearsal can be associated with session(s) or full days. The rehearsal segment differentiates between technical, cue2cue or talent sessions, structuring the rehearsal operations.
Agenda & Running Order
Like the rehearsal plan you and your team develop and maintain your event agenda per venue and event day. You can add sessions to the event days, define their headlines, give a brief description of each session, add talent-specific requirements for each session and assign the timeslot.
Once a session is defined and you’re ready to go into more detailed planning, you can enter the running order operation of 7D-Live. Each session can be structured by scenes, including timing, talent, headline, description, and a customizable section for specific department briefings, e.g. Audio, video, props, set or lighting requirements.
Booking
Your event requires Staff, Talent, Attendees, Suppliers, Exhibitors, Sponsors, Client resources. To manage those, you access the booking dashboard. Within this module you find all the above as selectable categories that you can now fill with life.…
In the process your team or the assigned users themselves will add required documents for accreditation, catering requirements, travel, and accommodation information as well as possible associates. Associates are for instance defined as crew members, assistants, interpreters, etc.
Before diving into the nitty gritty, you get an overview of the roles that have been or need to be filled. You can filter by event roles or tags, and you operate with a specific booking process. While you can easily assign roles within your organisation, other resources are found externally. All those roles are assigned a status: qualifying, inquiring, negotiating, onboarding, joined and declined. Joined means this role has been filled and the assigned person has now access to your subscription within the access and limitations that you assigned for each role.
A lot of this data can be pulled from previous event settings, while newly entered data will go into the database for future purposes.
Budget
The budget dashboard gives a snapshot view of the overall financial status of the production, the purchase and expense side as well as the different income streams for each event (attendee, sponsor, exhibitor, and client).
Procurement
The purchase evaluation of the production starts with creating bills of quantities (lists of what you need), which can be fully customized. From this BOQ the user creates requests for quotations (RFQ) which can be sent directly to suppliers in your contact database. The incoming quotes are captured and allow immediate comparison, not only between different suppliers but as well against the BOQ on completeness.
Following an evaluation of technical and financial aspects, purchase orders can be issued straight out of the platform and being sent to the chosen supplier. The purchase order information can be linked to accounting or ERP systems via the 7D-Live API.
It is not unusual that event professionals are forced to submit budgets without going through a clean calculation process. Once a BOQ is created you or the team in charge of the financial side can assign estimation
values to single items or chapters and outline a first draft production budget. Throughout the process those drafts can be replaced with solid budget numbers. Possible deviations can be highlighted not only for
accounting and controlling purposes but as well to possibly charge those as variations to the client.
CRM
Looking at the income streams of your event now, you can specify multiple CRM processes for the different sources of income.
In case of paying attendees, the process would be invitation, followed by registration, payment, confirmation/ticketing. On the other hand, sponsors and exhibitors follow a more classic CRM approach of qualifying, proposing, negotiating, closing, following an operational process of quote, sales order, payment, and fulfilment.
7D-Live allows you to create price books/lists for your revenue streams per each event or in general for certain clients or projects.
In cases where you produce an event on behalf of a client, in a classic agency or production role, you can use the BOQ structure not only to add your own revenues and resources based on your price book, but as well as a monitoring and control tool for your cash flow and profit margins.
This outcome can as well be directly linked with your accounting or ERP software via API.
Work Management
As a company in the events industry, be it agency, organiser, or supplier, on each event you and your team generate an immense amount of data that is time sensitive.
Managing this data, keeping deadlines, matching delivery dates is crucial to your projects and your business. In the 7D-Live production plans you can outline the bigger picture structured in production phases. In Rehearsal, Agenda and Running Order Management sections, you can create a detailed event timing accessible to all key players to match each milestone and deadline. In the Booking module you define booking periods, travel, and accommodation arrangements and much more that is time sensitive.
On top 7D-Live allows you to assign Task, Work and Memos from every corner of the software and therefore send clear instructions and cutoff timings to the team members in charge.
The Calendar view displays all this information while notifications keep you up to speed about cutoffs, deadlines, delays, and follow-ups.
Calendar View
The calendar view is truly 360 degrees. It is your choice and preference how you see the production calendar.
Aside from a general view which allows you to dig down into details, you can select calendar views from the perspective of your choice, Venue, Staff, Supplier, Talent, from a Travel & Freights perspective or an Accommodation & Catering point of view.
Calendar entries can be shared outside the software or outside your organisation via calendar files.
The Gantt chart representation of the calendar is interchangeable with a kanban board view on Work and Task level to cater to everybody’s individual preference.
It is as well possible to integrate your project data with other work management tools via API.
Notifications
According to their personalized notification settings, each user receives notifications, categorized in reminders (relayed from task, work, memo), actions (based on the calendar) and system (system-generated notifications). Notifications can be configured as in-software only or as email notifiers.
Integration of other work management tools via API is possible here as well.
Subscription & Settings
7D-Live offers subscription packages based on subscriber seats (you, your team and even selected “permalancers” and event seats (freelancers, clients, sponsors, and all parties that need to be involved in the information flow of the event). The signup and payment for the platform can be on a monthly or annual subscription basis.
In the settings module of the subscription, you can maintain your company profile and subscribers.
Here you can as well define outlines and parameters that apply to all of your teams alike, for instance your price book, general data formats, the budget framework you want to use for BOQs and many more.