On this lovely late-May Forum Friday, I thought I’d get a conversation going about the ROI that 
brings to your studio or team. We often have people who see great potential in using , but need some help convincing someone to approve budget and resources for adoption.
I usually approach this question in terms of estimating the net time saved by different production roles using . Subscribing at the Super Awesome support level of $50/user/month can be offset pretty easily by making a convincing argument that you can save each user an hour or two per month, depending on the various burn rates of your staff.
~2 hrs/month = ~30 min/week = ~6 min/day
There are plenty of potential slowdowns and bottlenecks you can alleviate that, even very conservatively, could add up to well past this.
- Time artists spend tracking down coordinators or supervisors to learn what they should be working on
- Time artists spend on complicated review submission processes, and notifying the right people
- Time artists spend waiting for feedback
- Time supervisors spend trying to figure out who needs feedback on what, with what level of urgency
- Time producers or coordinators spend getting updated status information from artists
- Time vendors and outsource managers spend finding and exchanging information over email
Shotgun can potentially help speed up all these processes, and more.
Sure, there are other costs to adopting (or any new system) that should be factored in, and some ongoing care and feeding by admins and internal support staff. There is also an optional investment by engineers or TD’s in building automations or integrations using the API’s or the Pipeline Toolkit integration platform, but those tend to come with their own efficiency gains and time savings, so can be justified individually, and can add big multipliers to the overall wins you see from .
But enough from me - how about some real-world examples from the community? What gains have you seen from adopting ? Have you been able to quantify those in some clearly-digestible ways? What would you say has been the biggest win for your studio? And so we are presenting the full picture - have there been any unexpected costs involved?
Happy Friday to all of you. Please chime in if you have some thoughts on this topic, for the sake of your industry brethren who are fighting the good fight to sell their management team on a system like . 