Based in the heart of Auckland city, the Edge is a premier performing arts, entertainment and conference centre comprising the Aotea Centre, the Auckland Town Hall, The Civic and Aotea Square.

The Edge hosts a diverse range of performances year round - and is the home to  many of the country's leading performing arts organisations, including NBR New Zealand Opera, the Auckland Theatre Company, The Royal New Zealand Ballet, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia, and Chamber Music New Zealand.

In 2002 The Edge commenced its largest ever software project, to create a portal which would become the ultimate knowledge repository for the organisation. It would significantly reduce the amount of duplication in its business processing communications and allow it to move away from a multiple- source single-access way of accessing information, to a single-source and through multiple-accesses.

The Edge has recently completed installing an IBM Lotus Domino-based portal, a CRM system, and a document management system.

Challenges at the Edge

The Edge found relying heavily on email as a way to communicate and collaborate within the organisation's geographically dispersed offices was slow, inefficient and duplicated efforts.  Also, as the organisation was not a 9 to 5 operation, it needed to get information in a clear and concise manner to night supervisors and staff that worked intermittently throughout the day. At the same time as achieving these goals, The Edge needed to gain a higher level of integration between its five customer databases from five distinct business areas (the Aotea Centre, the Auckland Town Hall, The Civic and Aotea Square).

Solution

Building on a IBM Lotus platform, The Edge integrated a number of databases and systems, creating; 

Key business benefits

The new systems allows The Edge to;

• Capture intellectual property which is a key competitive advantage
• Focus on business needs and see how business information flows and how to improve it
• More complex tracking and reporting of events such as its Community Arts Program, to the Council
• Maintain closer adherence to policies for human resources, parking and OSH.  Once a policy goes through a review cycle it is placed on Edge Net. It also clears up issues of managing accident reporting as it provides a complete audit trail of the report
• Prompt a Requests Maintenance program, where centrally maintenance requests can be recorded and the time taken to action them is measured and monitored
• Targeted mail-outs more effectively  drastically reducing the number of returns
• Enable faster delivery of the most up to date event information
• Increase communication within The Edge - enabling actions and decisions to be made faster. Furthermore, time efficiencies have been created for The Edge personnel by eliminating duplication of communications

Why choose IBM Lotus Solutions?

• Offered best-of-breed lotus software for The Edge
• Provided the integrated collaboration tools The Edge sought
• Guidance was provided from its IBM knowledge management business partner CrossWare
• Lotus Notes allowed the flexibility of being able to apply different levels of security for staff, partner and clients

Vital statistics

• Planning for the portal commenced in February 2002
• Edge Net, Document Store and Contact Manager all live as of June 2003
• 80 users

For more information

Paul Graham
General Manager
paul@crossware.co.nz
ph 09 379 7044

February 2004