“We left Excel in the past,” The National Theatre has moved to Tabidoo

We have resolved the parking requirements and contract control. We started with one app and now have almost a dozen.

Ing. Dagmar Růžičková- Head of the Department of Economics and Administration of the TPS

Introducing the National Theatre

The National Theatre is a state-funded organization whose founder is the Ministry of Culture. It is not a commercial entity, but few people can imagine how big an organisation it is. **Maybe a few numbers will help: **

• 4 stages,
• 4 artistic ensembles,
• over 1,300 employees,
• over half a million spectators a year,
• sales of 300 million.

And it’s not just about what the audience sees on stage every night. The National Theatre has its own scenery and costume production, warehouses, car transport, car park, and is involved in outreach and education programmes, as well as supplying heat and cold to other entities, for example.

Challenges

Like any large company, it has information systems that are a mainstay in its economic and administrative operations, and these are robust solutions. An organization of this size cannot do without them. And then there’s the lot of quote-unquote small processes, problems or assignments you have to deal with. For example, data is missing, papers get lost rolling from office to office, everyone has their spreadsheet and no one knows which is the “right” one.

Working with Tabidoo

But there is a solution to this situation, there always is. The easiest thing to do is to be content with the way things are. But then you can use the rule of these days, namely “there is an app for everything “. The National Theatre discovered Tabidoo by accident, at a conference on digitalisation. At the time it was tackling the problem of how to improve collaboration on projects in investment and maintenance. All they had was a shared excel spreadsheet, and a shared file repository, but it still wasn’t right. Back at the conference, they tried to convert the excel spreadsheet to Tabidoo and the first application was born.

LOOK AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE AND LISTEN TO THE WHOLE STORY OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE AND TABIDOO

Result

Six months later, the first application was a fairly well-developed database with lots of gadgets like:

• end of contract notifications,
• financial performance overview,
• collection of capital action requests for the next period.

And it didn’t stop at just that one app, the National Theatre already has almost a dozen. For example, they have solved:

• requests for parking in the car park,
• through a public form individual departments can send requests, which after approval will then reach the right people, including printing contracts directly from the application or
• through Tabidoo they have carried out a check of contracts entered in the Register of Contracts, across the entire theatre.

“We have not yet started connecting to our existing systems,” adds Ms Růžičková.