This guide is intended to help production staff explain the need for resource management in terms that connect to broader administration priorities. Use the sections below as talking points for budget planning, software renewal, capital requests, or conversations with leadership.
Introduction
As we know, theatre & event production is an unusually asset-intensive environment. However, explaining this to managers that work outside of production can be challenging.
During annual budget planning, an inventory management system can look like just one more software expense. Why do you need a dedicated system? Couldn’t the equipment just be kept in a spreadsheet or the university’s existing asset database?
The answer has to do not just with the amount of physical objects, but how those objects are used.
Your inventory is not static. It’s constantly moving and changing. It’s used on productions, moved between venues, altered, repaired, loaned, returned to storage, and used again.
A spreadsheet can tell you what you owned at one point in time, but it’s hard to track how those resources are assigned, used, or changed over time. Managing them requires knowing where they are, when they are needed, what they are being used for, and when they will be available again.
By connecting the resources an institution owns to their actual usage, it allows the documentation to stay accurate. In doing so, it supports a much larger set of institutional priorities.
Executive Summary
Institutional Resource Stewardship
We need to maintain responsible oversight of organization-owned production resources. Centralized records help us track what we own, where it is, what condition it’s in, and how it is being used.
Risk Management & Insurance Documentation
We need reliable documentation of organization property before a loss occurs. Detailed asset records can support insurance claims, audits, theft reports, loss assessment, and other risk-management needs.
Data-Driven Capital Planning
We need to make purchasing and replacement decisions based on actual operational needs. Asset condition and usage history data can support budgeting, capital requests, replacement planning, and long-term investment decisions.
Institutional Knowledge Retention
We need accurate and up-to-date information about production resources to remain with the institution as people come and go. A shared and continuously updated record keeps that knowledge accessible and current as students graduate, staff leave, and faculty retire.
Financial & Environmental Sustainability
We need to make better use of the resources the organization already owns. Better visibility and searchability makes it easier to find, reuse, adapt, and share existing resources before purchasing or renting items that we might already own.
Resource Utilization & Cost Avoidance
We need to understand whether our resources are actually meeting our needs. Usage history can reveal items that are no longer being used, recurring rental expenses that may justify a purchase, and opportunities to make better use of limited and potentially costly storage space and increasingly stretched funds.
Educational & Workforce Development
We need to prepare students and give staff the tools to manage resources within real-world production constraints. The workflow gives students and staff practical experience with planning, allocation, availability, competing needs, and responsible use.
What These Priorities Mean in Practice
1. Institutional Resource Stewardship
Administrative framing: Maintains an accurate, centralized record of organization-owned resources, supporting responsible oversight and accountability.
What this means in production
Production departments can be responsible for a surprisingly large amount of institutional property.
Lighting fixtures, consoles, microphones, speakers, tools, costumes, props, rigging equipment, staging, furniture, and other resources may be distributed across shops, theatres, studios, classrooms, storage rooms, warehouses, and other buildings.
These are organization-owned assets and should be documented as such. Responsible stewardship means being able to answer basic questions:
- What do we actually own?
- Where is it?
- What condition is it in?
- Who is responsible for it?
- Is it currently in use, in storage, on loan, under repair, or unavailable?
- What did we originally pay for it?
- What would it cost to replace?
A way to explain it
“Our department is responsible for a substantial amount of organization-owned property. Production resource management gives us a reliable institutional record of what we own, where it is, what condition it’s in, and how it’s being used. We have a responsibility to manage the resources the organization has purchased over time.”
2. Risk Management & Insurance Documentation
Administrative framing: Provides reliable asset documentation to support insurance coverage, claims, audits, loss prevention, and institutional risk management.
What this means in production
Imagine a pipe bursts over a costume storage room and destroys hundreds of costumes. After the flood is not the ideal time to figure out what used to be on the racks.
Reliable records can include quantities, descriptions, photographs, purchase information, condition, storage location, and replacement value. That gives the university something useful to work from during insurance proceedings.
A way to explain it
“We don’t want the first time we document what was in a room to be after a fire, flood, theft, or other loss. Maintaining reliable records gives the university documentation of its property anytime it is needed.”
3. Data-Driven Capital Planning
Administrative framing: Provides asset condition, age, and utilization data to support capital requests, replacement planning, departmental budgeting, and long-term investment decisions.
What this means in production
Consider a request for $150,000 to replace aging lighting equipment.
A request based primarily on “our fixtures are getting old and we need new ones” gives administration relatively little information for evaluating that need against other institutional priorities.
Production resource data can show:
- 85% of the inventory is more than 15 years old.
- Repairs have increased over the last two academic years.
- Replacement parts for these models are becoming unavailable.
- The department is renting about $3,000 in additional equipment per production.
- This equipment is required by most productions during the season.
- Existing inventory is routinely fully allocated during peak periods.
That information gives a clearer picture of the operational need and can help develop multi-year replacement plans rather than waiting for equipment to fail and requesting emergency funding.
A way to explain it
“Good resource data helps us make better requests. We can show what we own, how old it is, how heavily it’s being used, what we’re spending on rentals and repairs, and where we’re consistently running short.”
4. Institutional Knowledge Retention
Administrative framing: Preserves operational knowledge beyond individual faculty, staff, and student tenure.
What this means in production
The longtime Technical Director knows there are six wireless microphones in a backstage cabinet, another four stored with Music, three older units that shouldn’t be used anymore, and two currently out for repair.
Then they retire.
Production departments accumulate an enormous amount of knowledge like this. Universities make the problem particularly pronounced because turnover is built into the environment. Students graduate just as they become knowledgeable. Graduate assistants leave. Faculty retire. Staff take other jobs.
Without a shared record, years of knowledge can leave with them. An inventory system keeps that information available to whoever comes next.
A way to explain it
“The information we maintain about university property needs to belong to the university, not to whichever faculty member, staff member, or student currently knows the most about it.”
5. Financial & Environmental Sustainability
Administrative framing: Improves visibility into existing resources so departments can reuse, adapt, share, and reallocate them before purchasing or renting additional assets.
What this means in production
In event production, we reuse things constantly. A platform becomes part of several different sets. A costume is altered for another performer. A lighting fixture supports hundreds of performances. Furniture appears in a show and appears again a few shows later.
This is both financially and environmentally prudent, but you can only reuse something if you know you have it.
A director requests a set of plates and bowls. The props team purchases them, only to discover a perfectly suitable set already buried in storage.
Or a lighting designer requests six moving lights and the production manager rents them, while another university venue owns eight comparable fixtures that are not being used during those dates.
Good visibility makes “What do we already have?” a routine part of production planning before the department begins looking to buy or rent.
With an appropriate system, we can reduce unnecessary purchasing and rentals while avoiding the additional storage, maintenance, and eventual disposal associated with buying more stuff.
A way to explain it
“Before we spend money to buy another object, we should be able to quickly and accurately determine whether we already own something that can meet the need.”
6. Resource Utilization & Cost Avoidance
Administrative framing: Provides utilization data that can identify underused resources, unnecessary storage, and areas where recurring demand may justify additional investment.
What this means in production
Utilization adds important context to a list of assets.
Over time, the inventory might show that a large scenic element has been sitting in storage for five years without being used on a single production. That gives the department useful evidence for deciding whether it should continue taking up limited storage space or be sold, donated, recycled, or otherwise removed.
The same history can reveal recurring shortages. Perhaps the department has rented the same type of projector for eight productions over the last three years because it does not own one that meets its current needs. An accurate rental history helps make the case that purchasing one may be a better long-term use of university funds.
Usage history supports decisions in both directions: which resources are still earning their place in storage, and where recurring demand may justify new investment.
A way to explain it
“Usage history helps us identify things we’re storing but no longer using, and it shows us where we’re repeatedly spending money to rent something that may make more sense to own.”
7. Educational & Workforce Development
Administrative framing: Creates opportunities for work-integrated learning through authentic resource planning, allocation, and accountability.
What this means in production
Students and staff who participate in production resource management are learning how professional production operates at a higher level of practice.
A student working with a lighting inventory may learn how to identify equipment, understand specifications, assess condition, allocate finite resources across simultaneous productions, identify conflicts, schedule availability, track repairs, and weigh renting against purchasing.
There is also a creative skill involved.
Professional productions work within real financial and resource constraints. Knowing what resources are available allows students and staff to develop creative solutions within those constraints. A costume gets altered. A scenic element gets transformed. Equipment is configured differently. Something designed for one purpose gets another life.
These are practical skills students and staff will use throughout their professional careers.
A way to explain it
“Giving our students and staff appropriate resource management tools provides a level of professional development that immediately translates into tangible benefits for our organization.”
Building a Sustainable Process
All of this is achievable.
Propared does not require a complete catalogue before it becomes useful. As inventory is used, the records can be created and updated as part of that work rather than as a separate administrative task. Additional inventory can be worked through as time allows. This allows the department to start getting useful information right away while building a more complete institutional record over time.
Propared is also designed for the work to be shared. Faculty, staff, production managers, students, and others involved in productions can contribute to building and maintaining reliable information rather than placing the entire responsibility on one person.
With that process in place, the department can build the reliable information needed to support responsible stewardship, risk documentation, capital planning, institutional knowledge, sustainability, cost avoidance, and student learning.
