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Brookstone Technologies, an IBM business
partner in Australia, is a world leader in the development of
"next-generation productivity solutions." Together with IBM,
Brookstone helped Alinta Assist, an Australian public utility
enhance its profitability with Lotus Notes.
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| Business need: |
Alinta wanted to increase market share
and enhance profitability by boosting revenue,
controlling costs, increasing efficiency and improving
customer service. |
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| Solution: |
The utility chose Brookstone
Virtual Office, which leverages the calendaring and
scheduling strengths of Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime and
Lotus Domino. |
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| Benefits: |
The results have been impressive,
including a 20 percent increase in productivity and
lower costs. Customer now receive their heating systems
on time in 98 percent of the cases and customer
satisfaction is at an all time high. |
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IBM Business Partner: Brookstone
Technologies
Brookstone Technologies is
involved in developing, building and integrating collaborative systems
with third party systems. It was established in 1987 and is
headquartered in Sydney and Perth Australia.
For Brookstone Technologies’ Don Langille, recent global changes in
workplace processes and methods bring with them the need for
significantly increased employee flexibility and mobility. He also
firmly believes that this increased employee flexibility and mobility
should include ready access to office facilities, systems and
information bases -- anytime, anywhere.
Brookstone, an IBM Advanced Business Partner, is a world leader in the
development of “next-generation business productivity solutions,” with
key emphasis on wireless connectivity and wireless-enabled workflow.
“Brookstone Technologies’ focus is to provide systems in this new and
exciting area to assist companies to take advantage of the relevant
technologies,” said Langille, who is vice president, global channel
partners.
“We’re pleased to tell our customers and prospective customers that we
have an excellent range of IBM Domino® and IBM Lotus Notes® skills
in-house that allow us to deliver great results for them,” Langille
explained.
One pleased Brookstone customer that has had significant benefits from a
Brookstone solution running on the Lotus platform is Alinta Assist,
which provides gas, electrical, air conditioning and plumbing services
to residential and commercial customers of Alinta, a publicly traded gas
and power utility. It also is headquartered in Perth.
The signature offering of Brookstone is BrookstoneVirtualOffice (BVO),
which functions on the Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes platform. BVO is a
virtual-office/paperless-office system designed for both centralized and
geographically dispersed organizations, as well as for individuals who
work in remote, non-office locations such as at home. It is
wireless-enabled for the interactive exchange of information and
workflow between a customer’s server and remote, wireless-enabled
devices.
“BVO delivers a comprehensive mobile management and access solution that
provides access to, and synchronization with, e-mail, calendar contact
data, enterprise files and data anytime, anywhere via most mobile and
wireless devices,” Langille said. “It will improve customer
relationships, increase employee productivity, protect mission-critical
business intelligence and simplify critical business processes,” he
said.
Alinta wanted to increase market share and enhance profitability by
boosting revenue, controlling costs, increasing efficiency and improving
customer service. The requirements included a simple way to gather and
enter critical business information, store the information in an orderly
manner and enable easy, user-friendly access to the information.
BrookstoneVirtualOffice, which leverages the calendaring and schedule
strengths of Lotus Notes, helped change what had been an inefficient
manual scheduling and accounting system into a comprehensive, yet
easy-to-use, resource-allocation and scheduling system. BVO also was
“personalized” to support the existing business functions of Alinta
Assist, rather than force procedural changes.
Overall, Alinta Assist has experienced significant savings in both the
time taken to schedule a service transaction and a significant
improvement in the allocation of its resources.
Steve Jones, chief executive officer of Alinta Assist, said, “An
absolute necessity was the ability to take full advantage of the
knowledge contained in our organization in order to sustain our
tremendous rate of growth.” The growth rate has been 10 percent monthly.
The results have been impressive, including a 20 per cent increase in
productivity and lower costs, Jones said. Customers now receive their
heating systems on time in 98 percent of cases, and customer
satisfaction is at an all-time high.
“Alinta Assist is delighted with the increased support and services we
are now able to provide our customers, thanks to the superb
collaboration, awareness-capability and remote operations provided by
BrookstoneVirtualOffice and IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Domino and IBM
Global Services,” Jones said.
“Our field personnel are being used more efficiently, with less idle
time, and their profitability has increased. Most important, we’re
delighted with the increased support and services we’re now able to
provide our customers,” Jones explained. Since its establishment as a
supplier of data communications and networking systems, Brookstone
Technologies has enjoyed rapid growth, becoming one of the largest
suppliers of knowledge-management systems in Australia. Brookstone also
is active in the United Status, Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong
and China.
Brookstone participates in IBM PartnerWorld® Industry Networks, which
offers a rich set of benefits to all PartnerWorld members who want to
team with IBM to build their vertical market capabilities, expand their
partner network and attract customers in the markets they serve. It is
optimized in the energy and utilities network, which means Brookstone
Technologies has developed further specialization by optimizing its
applications with IBM technologies, achieving success with their own
solutions and other criteria.
“IBM has provided Brookstone Technologies with excellent technical
support for our research and development endeavours over the 10 years we
have been a Business Partner,” Langille said. “Joint marketing campaigns
with IBM provided a number of direct leads and assisted our business to
grow. IBM is good in providing support for our development efforts --
even to providing IBM specialists from other parts of the world to help
us develop cutting-edge solutions.”
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