The urban theater of the future.
No, we didn't give them this title: that's how NTGent describes itself. And they don't stop at descriptions either: in addition to drawing up a manifesto with 10 rules that such a city theater of the future must satisfy, they also consulted Process Delight. The content and production of their plays may have been adapted to the needs of present and future society, but their internal operations were not. And so we were suddenly offered the lead role in their latest play, "Help, our invoicing is inefficient and time-consuming." A story that was right up our alley.
Client profile: NTGent
Nederlands Toneel Gent(NTGent or NTG) is a city theater in Ghent, founded in 1965. Their mission? to question, motivate and move a diverse audience. It does this by creating and presenting high-profile productions and using theater for social debate. Since 2018, the artistic direction of NTGent has been in the hands of Swiss director, sociologist and theater maker Milo Rau, who upon his appointment wrote a manifesto that the city theater of the future should meet.
From manual billing...
Our story with NTGent began with a problem concerning the theater's financial activities. For example, the follow-up of invoices and order forms was still completely manual and everything was consequently printed and archived in folders. Apart from the fact that this is a very time-consuming and inefficient way of working, it is also not in line with their future-oriented goal of a reduced ecological footprint. With the strong evolution towards a digital world in mind, NTGent started looking for a partner who could offer them an increased sense of digital comfort.
... to automation.
So what did the solution provided by our Digital Comfort Providers, obviously following our well-known method of mutual consultation and mutual input with the client, look like in concrete terms? Well, as experts in automation of administrative processes, we built a clear dashboard. This dashboard, shown in the image below, provides a user-friendly and well-organized layer on top of the SharePoint library where authorized people add their invoices and order forms.
This collection of data is linked to an application built in Power Apps. This application ensures that only the appropriate people responsible are identified for the invoices and purchase orders for which they are authorized. That way, they can view, approve or reject these documents in their personal dashboard.
All's well that ends well.
The benefits? Those lie mainly in the ease of use, time savings and security that the application offers. The processing time for approving or rejecting invoices and order forms has decreased enormously, NTGent can start up flows itself, can consult all documents in one central dashboard (if accessed) and can download information when needed. The paper-free, digital future thus beckons for Ghent City Theatre.
