Managing Music Festival On-Site Maintenance.

A festival site infrastructure can take weeks to build and organisers need to ensure that sufficient support is available during this period, through the event dates and during breakdown post event. How do festival organisers mange their on-site maintenance to ensure that everything works and operates as intended.

Every contractor used to create a music festival and build the site infrastructure will have some form of on-site support. Some contractors are better than others and the support and maintenance provided can vary between suppliers. The festival organisers will employ someone with responsibility for all operational aspects of the event and they are often the central contact point for co-ordinating any on-site support and maintenance issues. It is not unusual for organisers to have their own small team to allocate maintenance duties to and they may include electricians, carpenters and other skilled technicians.

Electrical Equipment.
For services like electricity generators, stage lighting and backline equipment contractors will always provide on-site support crews. The nature of the equipment being supplied dictates that specialist skills are required. However, organisers can make their own electricians available to advise and assist with potential problems. The on-site electrician can also be utilised for simple tasks including maintaining camping zone electricity and organiser's temporary office space for example.

Structural.
As with electrical related contractors the suppliers of staging and lighting rigs requires specialist skills and certification so will always require the presence of the contractor's own support crews. However, with other temporary structures like marquees, signage and security fencing it is not usual for minor issues to dealt with by the organiser's own maintenance team.

Vendor and Sponsor Support. 
All festival vendors and sponsors are allocated pitches and although external contractors are used for the construction, connection to electricity and water supplies they rarely provide any on-site support. The person responsible for account managing vendors and sponsors will co-ordinate any requests with the organiser's own maintenance crews to make any necessary repairs or fixes as they are likely to be relatively simple.

Other Services. 
The organiser's own maintenance crews may also have responsibility for other tasks on-site that could include maintaining any bicycles and golf carts used by staff to get around the festival site. This team will also be expected to have a variety of tools and parts to carry out different tasks that may include bulbs, fuses, cabling and general construction components for example.

Health and Safety. 
All contractors will need to comply with prevailing health and safety guidance issued by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). For organisers with their own maintenance teams the operational management team must ensure that all on-site crews comply with guidance as appropriate.

For festival organisers planning their events using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics including a specific module for contractors. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by Steve Sammon from Pixabay

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