While we had the pleasure of working with talented freelancers and innovative music studios, the experience of Universal Production Music was truly unique. First of all, it was the first time we worked with such a large music production company. Second, we were able to see how well Pibox deals with challenges of a bigger scale.

Today we’d like to look back at the work we did for Universal Production Music – and how it affected its workflow.

The biggest problem for any creative company is the necessity to balance tools, communication, and timing. The average project management algorithm looks the following way:

Just one track can take weeks before it’s finalized and ready to go. But when you are a large music production company that must process multiple tracks daily, building a centralized system that lets you exchange files, communicate, monitor deadlines and keep checklists is a priority.

Universal Production Music needed a fast and efficient solution that would:

That was the easiest part. In total, Universal Production Music used to work with 8+ tools to wrap up just one project. That meant hours of switching between different channels, not to mention the subscription fees. Pibox was initially designed to be a combination of a communication service, a review platform, cloud storage, and a data gatherer. So, implementing necessary features, making the entire workflow fully visible and comprehensible was a simple, almost intuitive process.

With Pibox, we enabled our client to monitor every stage of production step-by-step, locate issues and nip in the bud by immediately bringing them up for discussion via communication channels. Additionally, all files were transferred and structured within the service, allowing us to considerably reduce upload and download time.

Team communication is the Pibox superpower – this is why it works so well for creative industries. To ensure that Universal Production Music enjoys top-notch communication between managers and composers, we created a separate channel for each track and equipped it with options to comment and provide instant feedback. It became a perfect addition to chat, allowing the composers to break every track down, second by second, leaving notes and suggestions for everyone to see. Moreover, Universal Production Music let other creative departments, such as Marketing, pilot Pibox, enabling them to work over their projects without any communication setbacks.

In addition to these improvements to the production process, the new system was very easy to learn and master, allowing the client to spend less time training new employers and get down to business.

Finalizing and submitting all the files in the right order is the ending point of each production process. It’s critical to keep content structured and placed in corresponding folders because the team needs to see how the end result fits the initial inquiry.

We were able to meet that need by placing checklists directly into the file system. In other words, we made it possible to view the entire progress, the percentage of files added. This simple solution made the entire process of finalization much faster and allowed all the participants to synchronize their tasks within one list. It means that the manager no longer had to request to submit the content or constantly refer to a self-made list. Pibox granted every member of the team access to a shared collaboration list with everything necessary close at hand.

According to Universal Production Music, this change saved the studio’s producers days and even weeks of back and forth.

There is no end to processes that can be and should be automated. At some point, both small tasks and time-consuming activities start requiring optimization.

Why is it so important?

Imagine having to create dozens of projects every day and then managing all participants going in and out. So many clicks to keep in mind, so much data to process…This can be solved either with a smart project creation feature or a flexible integration with an API.

While we’re only scratching the surface of the automation opportunities Pibox can provide, each new project helps us come up with new ideas and bring them to life, step-by-step. For example, repetitive tasks research allowed us to implement the following automation features

• Automated content transfer between review channels
• Auto-saving checklist templates
• Bulk collaboration structure creation

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The bigger the company is, the more tools it requires. The larger the piece of art, the more resources it takes. Things used to be that way.

Luckily, for the music industry, tables are turning and the change brings a much-needed boost to productivity.

Having replaced over five key applications, Pibox became a one-for-all communication and creativity channel, allowing Universal Production Music to pick up the speed and let managers and composers dedicate themselves to creating more new, unique tracks each month!

Our team was proud to dive into the processes of Universal Production Music and streamline them into one powerful system for collaboration, communication, and creativity.