Strateline Systems Group

Services

From first diagnosis to a system your team actually uses.

Workflow Assessment

A structured look at how projects, media, and approvals move through your operation today. You get a clear map, the bottlenecks that matter, and a prioritized roadmap, whether or not you hire me to build it.

Production Management Systems

Systems for tracking shows, episodes, deliverables, schedules, and vendors, built on the platform that fits your team. That might be Airtable, Microsoft Power Platform and SharePoint, or the tools you already own. The design comes first; the platform follows.

Automation and AI Agents

Automations that remove the manual handoffs, built in the platforms you already run or the right ones to add. AI agents with instruction design that holds up under real production pressure.

Infrastructure Guidance

Storage, editorial, and cloud decisions made in the context of your workflow, not a spec sheet. Where hardware or integration is needed, I bring in trusted partners.

Beyond media. Most of my work is in media and post-production, but the approach isn't industry-specific. If your operation has work moving between teams, tools, and approvals, let's talk.

My approach

Most workflows aren't designed. They accumulate.

A problem appears, someone builds a fix, and the team moves on. Over time the fixes stack on top of each other. Feedback loops get longer, assets and costs get harder to track, and things get lost in the shuffle. In larger companies the effect compounds, because each department's patchwork has to coordinate with everyone else's.

I call these productivity off-ramps: every place the system pulls a team off the road to its goal. What's usually missing isn't a better tool. It's a holistic design.

That's why I don't start with a platform. I start with how the work moves, and choose the tools that serve that design, not the other way around.

I learned this in television post-production, but the pattern is the same anywhere work moves between people and systems.

Design it like an ecosystem

Ecosystems are the largest, most successfully engineered systems in the world. So I pattern my work after nature, and follow the work, the data, or the product through its whole life.

01OriginWhere does it begin?

02NeedsWhat does that beginning require?

03FlowThen what happens?

04EndWhat does the end of its life look like?

05AfterAnd what happens after that?

Four principles

Connect, don't silo.

Information should move between teams on its own, not wait for someone to chase it.

Automate the redundant.

If a task repeats, the system should do it, so people can spend their time on judgment.

Cut the noise.

Organize data into clear, digestible pieces. Show people what they need, when they need it.

Build for growth.

A good system has room for what comes next: new teams, new tools, and AI.

Track record

Putting it into practice at Paramount.

The situation

I ran the team at Paramount responsible for receiving and formatting acquired programming. When the software we used to track our work and expenses was being retired, it was up to me to decide what came next.

The decision

I chose not to recreate the old tool. Before selecting a platform, I mapped the entire production lifecycle and the team's current processes, identified the opportunities for improvement, and then picked the tech. For that team, at that time, Airtable was the right fit, so I designed and built a new production-management system on Airtable around the four principles.

For another team, the right answer might be a different platform. The approach is what carries over.

Connected

Linked to other teams' systems, with real-time status and request notifications pushed to team messaging

Automated

Automatic record creation, rippling status updates, and built-in data validation

Focused

Context-sensitive interfaces and mobile dashboards showing each person only what's relevant

Growing

Room for new capabilities, including AI-assisted troubleshooting and automated productivity reporting

The results

~40%

less time spent giving other teams updates

~50%

less time spent creating project startup records

~90%

fewer status-update emails, as other teams adopted the system

4 hrs → 20 min

to produce the monthly productivity report

Estimates based on before-and-after comparisons.

Beyond media

A self-service assessment app for a relationship coaching and consulting business.

The business is built around Elements of Connection, an assessment its founder created. I designed and built a web app that takes people through it from start to finish: 34 questions, automatic scoring, tiebreaker questions when results are close, and instant excerpts from the full report on their primary and secondary profiles. Those excerpts lead into the complete report, which is available for purchase.

Same approach, different industry. I followed the work from first question to finished report and built the system around that flow, using lightweight web tools the business can run without an IT department.

Web appAutomated scoringPersonalized reportsFree-to-paid funnel

Try the assessment →

How it works

A clear process, sized to your operation.

STEP 01

Discover

Conversations with the people doing the work, plus a close look at the tools and data you already have.

STEP 02

Design

A system design you can review before anything is built: structure, interfaces, and automation plan.

STEP 03

Build

Incremental delivery with your team in the loop, so it fits how they work from day one.

STEP 04

Hand off

Documentation and training so your team owns it. Ongoing support available if you want it.

About

Built from inside the operation, not the sales deck.

Strateline Systems Group is led by Nathaniel Scates, who spent 20 years at Paramount (Viacom/CBS) as Senior Director. Along the way he led a facility-wide move from isolated edit storage to shared storage and media asset management, and later designed and built an enterprise production-management application that replaced a vendor-defined system. In 2026 he left Paramount to launch Strateline.

That inside view is the difference. Strateline starts with how your people actually work, then builds the system around them, on whatever platform fits. No generic templates, no forcing your team into someone else's process or someone else's software.

Strateline is my practice. For projects that call for skills, expertise, or bandwidth beyond my own, I bring in trusted specialists and stay accountable for the result.

Based in Nashville, working with teams anywhere.

AirtablePower PlatformPower AutomateSharePointZapierAI agentsAvid ecosystemsShared storage

Your post workflow is a system. Was it ever designed like one?

It's not a tools problem, it's a workflow problem.