Lowe and VYRE win Best Intranet Prize at BCS IM Awards

15.12.06, London - VYRE and Lowe & Partners Worldwide are delighted to announce that "Lowe Go" has won the best intranet at the British Computer Society Information Management awards.

"Lowe Go dispels the belief that intranets are little more than a dumping ground for information. The site is vibrant, reflects the creative culture of Lowe and adds genuine business value by supporting creative collaboration on a global basis."VYRE CEO, Andy Peters

Lowe & Partners Worldwide is a global advertising agency that has over 80 agencies in 54 different countries. In the late 90's and early part of this decade Lowe went through an aggressive merger and acquisition phase and this expansion presented a number of challenges to the network, which included:

● Effective group communication and sharing of information
● Knowledge retention when personnel move on
● The need to create and promote group cohesion and identity
● Increased efficiency and uniformity of business processes
● Effective resource planning on international projects
● Centralized access to creative tools (DAM and creative collaboration)

The creation of a collaborative portal/intranet, built on the VYRE Unify content management system, has helped to address these concerns and support creative excellence across the Lowe Network. The intranet, branded "Lowe Go", provides a virtual ‘desktop' for Lowe users and supplies fast access to all the information, people and business tools needed to add substantial business value.

Drew Murdoch, Project Manager at Lowe & Partners worldwide commented "Lowe's business is about creativity, and brilliant work only happens when talent, ambition and focus come together in a collaborative culture. Lowe Go has delivered increased efficiency and collaboration so that now everyone feels part of the Lowe network."

By creating a collaborative community and transferring traditional business processes to an online environment "Lowe Go" is increasing performance across key business areas including knowledge management, strategic planning and resource planning. Furthermore, it brings people of different communities (account management, planners, creative, finance etc) into one workplace to generate ideas and review new creative work.

To support the collaborative community the site includes virtual intranets for each agency, latest news and RSS feeds, strategic and planning tools, client areas, blogs and forums and a digital asset management solution that manages and distributes over 92,000 video and rich media assets.

The digital asset management functionality includes creative project areas and a unique real time video editing tool that dramatically decreases the cost and time it takes to create video showreels.

Drew Murdoch commented "prior to Lowe Go the creation of showreels was an offline process, which was both time intensive and costly, now anyone can create showreels with ease and the potential savings to the business are enough to justify the investment in VYRE Unify alone."

One of the major benefits of the project was the ability of the intranet to bring different agencies across the network together and overcome many group IT and communication issues. This was achieved through the VYRE Unify framework, which has delivered ease of content publishing across a global community of content contributors and integration to multiple LDAP realms and legacy systems. The consolidation of user realms and the provision of single sign on have enabled Lowe to better understand the expertise of the entire network, allowing people to search for skills and sector experience within the group.