Rain or shine, Macy's will stage the 82nd edition of its world-famous Thanksgiving Day Parade on Central Park West in New York City the morning of Nov. 27.
And, as it does with just about everything else in the world, IT will have played
a major role in the organization and presentation of the 2.5-mile-long
event, which will be viewed by about 3 million people in person and an
estimated 45 million on NBC television around the world.
More than 5,000 Macy's department store employees, family members and assorted
volunteers will be donning costumes, holding down the lines on those
dirigible-like balloon characters, helping to seat audience members and
performing any number of other tasks.
The Macy's Parade and Entertainment Group manages all the information
on the people who work at the huge event, including thousands of
volunteers and all the logistics required to ensure the smooth flow of
all the helium balloons, floats, singers, dancers, performers and
celebrities along the streets of New York City into Herald Square.
Information involving all those workers and their duties on event day must pass through the desk of Susan Babb, co-director of the parade.
For years, her office used to collect paper applications for all the
volunteer staff and simply kept all those unwieldy physical files in
drawers and boxes. Three years ago, the office moved to a Microsoft
Access 2000 database system, which offered obvious advantages over the
old one but was still difficult for some people to use.
"Long, long ago, they used to be done on little index cards, similar to
the Dewey Decimal System [the old library book filing system]," Babb
said with a laugh. "We have been upgrading in the past three years --
first with Microsoft Access 2000, and more recently with Filemaker Pro."
Venerable FileMaker Pro to the Rescue
Babb's office, along with Macy's Parade Studio in Hoboken, N.J., this
year switched over to a networked version of FileMaker Pro 9 for a
large number of tasks, including costume inventory and assignment,
float and balloon inventory and location, and volunteer history and
assignment.
FileMaker, a company now owned by Apple Computer, has been around a
long time -- since the early 1990s -- and is older than Access. But it
proved to be just what the administrator ordered.
Click here to view a Quicktime video of Susan Babb describing her use
of FileMaker Pro 9 for administration of parade duties.
Before FileMaker Pro was deployed, the operation of the Access database
required programming knowledge beyond the basic consumer level, Babb
said. This caused delays and resulted in the need to export all work
from Access queries into Microsoft Excel documents to find specific
information in a user-friendly manner.
Time-consuming tasks, such as assigning volunteers parade
responsibilities have been reduced from about 10 days to just one or
two days, Babb said.
"We had been working with an older version of Access (2000). We had a
volunteer who had worked with FileMaker in the past and suggested using
it," Babb said.
There were a few aspects of the organization of the parade with which Macy's had run into problems, Babb said.
"The older version of Access -- I am not familiar with the more updated
version -- was too complex. It wasn't user-friendly. The average user
had to have a lot of computer knowledge in order to build queries,
things like that," Babb said.
A second issue was the fact that everyone working on the Access database at the same time had to "shut out of it before you could save and make your changes," Babb said. "We actually had a file corrupt last year, in November, like two weeks before the parade, and no one could use the system for a full day."
Another problem was enabling the Macy's volunteers to work with familiar faces.
"When they work at the
event, mostly want to work alongside their family and friends. It
becomes complicated using the older system. FileMaker has allowed us to
create groups of people, each with a number, that identifies people who
would like to be connected together," Babb said.
"So that when we are assigning people to tasks, we can move large
groups of people together, who want to be together. The software now
does it all at once, too."
Admin Time Cut Way Down
Previously, Babb said, it would take anywhere from three to four days
to assign 1,600 balloon handlers. "This year, it took me about six
hours," she said.
"We've seen some great improvement in operations this year," Babb said.
"We're planning to expand the use of the software for next year to keep
sizes of costumes for repeate volunteers, the number of handlers for
each balloon, and others."
FileMaker Pro has the ability to important and export files from a Web
site, and Babb said that Macy's is planning to institute that for next
year, so that volunteers can complete their "paperwork" online.
An 82-year-old institution is finally moving into the Internet age.
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