Established in 1958, Lendlease Engineering (Lendlease) is an international construction and property management group headquartered in Sydney. Its expertise lies in shaping cities including urban and retail precincts, workplaces, universities, stadiums, hospitals and creating strong, connected communities for the young and elderly worldwide. As part of their business expansion, Lendlease Engineering decided to digitise its operations, starting with migrating its business-critical systems, to cloud-based applications to become more agile, connected, efficient and scalable. 

Lendlease approached Telstra Purple, initially to develop and deploy a Microsoft Azure-based document management and storage application, EIMS, which would centrally manage the project documents and help collaborate with its clients and partners. 

Further to the deployment of EIMS, Lendlease also required comprehensive management, support and assistance from Telstra Purple as the group did not have the expertise needed to manage the application within its IT team.

“Traditionally we have been using legacy types of applications and systems for document management which offered little consistency and varied from site to site. This prompted us to bring in a more conducive, futureproof system which could potentially change our ways of working.”

David Warren, General Manager at Lendlease Engineering.

Key Issues

• Clients and partners could not access project documents while working remotely at project sites causing delays in business operations
• Multiple copies of the documents existed which led to a disoriented system with zero control over its sharing and editing privileges
• Documents could not be shared, promptly and securely, with its teams, partners or clients

Solution

Telstra Purple developed and deployed the EIMS application, built on Microsoft Azure, to create project sites with its data and information, along with branded documentation, forms and other materials which Lendlease's partners and clients need to execute the projects.  After the successful deployment of the application, Telstra Purple took the responsibility of managing EIMS and as a result set up a dedicated service desk that included developers and engineers to provide operational stability through proactive and reactive support, with little to no outages.

Whenever Lendlease’s IT team needs support, the service desk accepts the request via email or phone, creates a ticket, prioritises the ticket based on the criticality, allocates the request for further processing and, finally, resolves it.

“Although there was a bit of initial change resistance from our teams as it was a new application, its ability to find information and documents quickly, visually powerful, easy-to-use user interface delighted them and overall improved our performance and processes”, said David.

As part of the process we:   

• Designed and built a cloud-based document management application which included Microsoft SharePoint site collections, Microsoft Flows, Microsoft Azure Functions, Microsoft Azure Logic Apps and Microsoft Azure Storage Accounts.
• Provided access to remote developers, including SharePoint Online specialist and Azure engineers, to assist with maintenance and operational support of the EIMS application.
• Offered ad-hoc technical assistance to Lendlease’s IT services and support team as and when needed.

Outcome

EIMS has allowed Lendlease to control and manage its documents easily, grant approvals for users to collaborate and securely share the documents with its stakeholders. It reduced the operational expenses, provide quick access to critical project information and helped to deliver exceptional customer experience as projects were completed on time, if not early.

Telstra Purple remotely provided Level 2 and 3 development and a technical resolver group for the EIMS application. The support team provided analysis and resolution of incidents including faults and outages of previously functional application components and services.  These incidents were raised in response to escalations from Lendlease level 1 or level 2 support teams, and/or email alerts from the EIMS application via in-built Application Insights.

• 2 hours response time for P1 and P2 incidents*
• 1 day response time for P3 and P4 incidents
• 100% resolution for all service requests

*P1 and P2 Incidents are of high urgency, high impact, affecting the entire operations of the EIMS applications

“At no point, did Telstra Purple say, 'no, it’s not in our contract', which really helped us to identify gaps and close them. Telstra Purple’s support was excellent throughout the project and beyond” said David.

Key Takeaways 

EIMS improved the overall operational performance as the project documents could be accessed remotely and shared securely with restricted or full privileges, enabling easy and quick collaboration between stakeholders. Efficient management of the application by Telstra Purple led to less or no outages which helped the business to operate at its best, providing Lendlease with:

• End-to-end support - Telstra Purple comprehensively managed EIMS application to ensure its seamless operation.
• Cost-efficiencies - Microsoft Azure-based EIMS application has reduced operational expenses and time spent by its IT team.