Production schedule

The timeline of the day written for the people building and dismantling the event rather than for the people attending it. It starts at load-in, well before doors, and ends when the last case leaves the room. Its rows are truck arrivals, rig and sound setup, booth build, signage, the tech check, then everything in reverse at the end. It exists as its own document because suppliers do not plan around your agenda, they plan around windows, the limited stretch in which they are allowed to get gear into a space and back out of it.

If your venue is a hotel or a catered space, they will write their own version of this and call it a BEO. Those two documents must agree with each other, and the day they disagree is the day a truck arrives at a locked loading bay. At community scale the production schedule is usually the top and bottom of the same sheet the run of show lives on, which is fine, as long as the crew can read their own rows without hunting.

Source: Standard live-event and venue practice. Venue Crew’s event and catering glossary frames it around the constraint that drives it, that suppliers work within the “limited window in which they can load in or out.” Cvent’s guide to banquet event orders documents the venue-written counterpart, a central document distributed to everyone executing the event, covering rooms, timings, headcount, setup, AV and costs.

First used in: 2.6 · The paper stack.