Mick Perrin Worldwide

The client.

Mick Perrin Worldwide (MPW) promote comedy in over 50 different countries around the world in the Arena and Theatre touring market.

The challenge.

To improve the management of new tours, keeping tour records up to date and removing the need to copy and paste to multiple spreadsheets.

Over the last 25 years, MPW has produced major UK and international tours for numerous top acts. They have a large presence at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a varied roster of emerging international and UK talent.

Their existing system used to start with the creation of a spreadsheet, where a list of tour dates was created. As numerous potential tour venues were contacted, the spreadsheet had to be constantly updated with a list of dates added as well as the towns and venue names. Then another spreadsheet had to be created with a list of all the marketing contacts and so it went on, with spreadsheet after spreadsheet required to deal with everything from print deliveries, sales, technicians, hotels, etc. With around 20-30 tours every season, the result was hundreds of spreadsheets and thousands of hours of admin spent manually inputting data.

In addition, any new system needed to allow multiple people to share and work on records at the same time. MPW also needed an archive of tour data for historical purposes, to track sales history, deals made and tickets sold.

The solution.

A custom application, collating information from all sources and auto generating data where needed.

CmdShiftR created a dashboard system where new tours can be created at the touch of a button, and which allows the user to set a start and end date, artist and tour name. A tour schedule is then automatically created with empty dates to fill. As these are populated, they automatically generate the Marketing, Print and Tech schedules and allow the user to perform instant searches for existing tours by artist, dates, venues, etc.

The results.

A database that maximises productivity and minimises the risk of mistakes whilst saving hours and hours of admin, spreadsheet creation and copying and pasting.

The system now automates the production of various documents and schedules – each individually tailored according to the client’s needs, saving a large amount of time for all concerned. If towns are already in the database, they auto-fill as the user types, and the available venues for that town then appear. Data such as seating capacity, booker name and email, marketing contact, previous sales etc. all appear instantly once the venue has been chosen. Crucially, as information changes (staff moving on, phone numbers changing, audience size growing or shrinking) this is updated throughout the database.

All this facilitates the transfer of information seamlessly, and often automatically, between the promoter, the venues and the tour manager. The system is also linked to the client’s financial package and allows their accounts department to be fully integrated within the entire process of any project.