From 3 week festival builds to 4 day stage plans

The Challenge

Production managers were spending about 3 weeks per festival building stage schedules across 4 to 7 stages, checking artist riders against sound zones and crew certifications in shared documents. When a headliner's management asked for a different slot, someone spent 6 to 8 hours walking through every downstream conflict by hand. The team knew what they wanted built, but constraint optimization is a narrow specialization and hiring for it would have taken 4 to 5 months they did not have.

What We Built

Two engineers joined the production team within five days and together they built a scheduling engine that maps each venue's stages, access roads, and sound zones, then fills in a conflict free schedule accounting for artist riders, crew rest rules, and teardown windows. When something changes, the system recalculates affected stages, crew slots, and truck sequences on its own. A complete 6 stage festival schedule comes back in under 4 minutes.

Results

3 weeks of scheduling per festival came down to 4 days. Artist swap rework went from a full day to about 15 minutes. Production managers got 130+ hours back per festival, time that now goes to vendor calls and creative decisions. The 10 week engagement cost less than half of what recruiting two senior AI hires over 5 months would have run.