Asset managment and production tracking
Tracking your production is as important as having a grocery list for your Boss' party. Surely, you do not want to upset your Boss and having to explain why you bought paper cups and no alchool.
The importance of production tracking in general is often missed even by large studios, but in my opinion is still one of main reasons why productions miss deadlines or go above budget.
I have heard a few voices pro and against the all idea, but I am under the impression that whoever has voiced against them has either not grasped the full extent of asset tracking... or maybe what should be tracked and what information should be reported.. or even worse, they do not want managment to know where they are at. I recollect seeing the implementation of one of such tracking options in a studio where they decided to go against the use of the reporting part of the software. Which to me is like: I want to have a clear list of grocery... but I do not want to know what is on it nor when I am going to eat.
In any case it is interesting to finally see that some companies are now focusing just on this part of production and starting to offer dedicated solutions to the market. I was fortunate enough to see the birth of one of such solutions, Shotgun Software, and I cannot recommend them enough.
Here are some of the few that are worth noticing.
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/data_management/openPipeline-4450.html
