Ensemble Theatre reduces admin time with Acrobat X

Ensemble Theatre has moved to a paperless subscription system after winning an Adobe makeover competition.

General manager of Australia’s longest continuously running professional theatre company, Dallas Lewis, said the upgrade from Adobe Reader to Adobe’s Acrobat X has had a significant impact on the efficiency of database management.

“We only had Adobe Reader but we never used the full fledged program,” Lewis said.

“Since they’ve come in and implemented the software for us we’re developing next year's subscription package for our subscriber base, which is about 9000 people each year.”

Lewis said Acrobat has also enhanced staff collaboration on important documents.

“There was a lot of going backwards and forwards between the external designer and our team to create [our show] booklets in the past,” he said.

“We would have emailed each other and the designer to make changes, but with Acrobat, we’ve been able to collate comments from individuals and those working on an individual document.”

Lewis said that instead of manually processing details about an actor for a specific production, the move to Adobe has made more of the company’s work web based.

“In the past, the organisation has had manual forms where staff have had to manually type in the data,” he said.

“Every time we employ an actor, you’ve got to recheck the data in a database because it is tied to payroll and other business functions, so I implemented a full project management system.”

The system, created through FileMaker, has cut out the need for actors and managers to post forms to the company.

“Once they’ve finished with a form, I can turn data into an Acrobat form which will then be used on our website and they can fill in a form and send it back via email,” Lewis said.

“In the past we would have sent a physical form out with information about an actor and asked the agent to send the form back to us and someone would have to be in front of the computer and type that in.”

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