SACRAMENTO, Calif. - February 24, 2003 - The City and County of Honolulu, the 12th largest municipal government in the U.S., has selected RecWare recreation management software to automate its entire park and recreation operations. Honolulu's Department of Parks and Recreation, which serves more than 900,000 residents and 5 million visitors, will use RecWare Safari software at over 60 park sites. This marks the first time Honolulu will fully automate its access to recreation program services.
"We serve a widespread population across a large geographic area, so services such as reserving park facilities or taking activity registrations become more complex," explained Joyce Mitsunaga, recreation specialist IV, Honolulu City and County's Department of Parks and Recreation. "RecWare's functionality closely matched our needs, and the company understood our challenges and internal processes. We now have access to a technology that lets us expedite facility permitting, streamline internal approvals, produce reports for our managers and enhance customer service."
Honolulu's Department of Parks and Recreation serves the entire island of Oahu, encompassing regional parks, community-based parks, beach/shoreline parks, botanical gardens and nature parks/reserves. With many remotely-located facilities, the department sought an automation solution that would streamline communication among its sites and enhance management of in-demand services such as facility scheduling, permitting and activity registration. Using RecWare Safari, the staff will automate its facility reservation process, activity registration and reporting, with plans to provide Internet registration for the public in the future.
As Duane Harlan, RecWare's founder and president, explained, "I was impressed with Honolulu's commitment to use technology to its fullest to serve its community and this motivated our team to exceed Honolulu's expectations wherever possible. To achieve this, we developed a new, Web-based, progressive approval system for facility reservations that makes approval of reservations and permits a breeze no matter where you are on the island. The system meets the needs of an agency that has many remote facilities, and eliminates the paperwork previously routed around the island for inter-office communications. We've now integrated these new features into our standard RecWare Safari product so all of our current and new RecWare Safari customers can enjoy this same upgraded technology."
Each year, the staff processes more than 16,000 facility permit applications for use of gymnasiums, sports fields, tennis courts, meeting rooms, picnic and other outdoor areas. The staff previously relied on a manual permit process, requiring lengthy internal approvals, signatures and paperwork. The department's new automated facility reservation system has an integrated e-mail approval feature that will streamline internal approvals for permit applications. The entire staff will be able to view facility reservation status, including what has been reserved, and the approval stage for any permit, at any time.
Honolulu also processes an estimated 64,000 activity registrations annually and will use RecWare's activity reservation capability to streamline program management.
Jennice Acosta, vice president of RecWare's customer service and the project manager for Honolulu's implementation, added, "Now at any given time, the Honolulu staff and the community will be able to see what activities are available or which ones are full. The information will be at their fingertips regardless of whether they're at a park and recreation facility, at home or at the office. More importantly, the department has gained a stable and reliable technology system, based on established standards and RecWare's proven success."
RecWare provides one of the most advanced software solutions for recreation management. The software is best known for its single application design - an improvement over older module-based systems that require users to open and close programs when moving between functions. RecWare software is Windows-based with an easy user interface that helps parks get up to speed quickly. The software also offers client/server functionality that allows staff at multiple offices to access data and share information.
More than 1,000 park and recreation agencies have chosen RecWare to automate everything from activity registration and facility reservation to membership management, reporting and Internet registration. RecWare is used by both organizations serving populations over 100,000 such as Oakland, Calif. and Austin, Texas, and departments serving populations in the thousands such as The Woodlands, Texas; Alpharetta, Ga.; and Windsor, Conn. The city of Henderson, Nevada, a nationally-recognized leader in the park and recreation field, uses RecWare Safari to automate administration at its 11 park and recreation facilities. Using the software, the city of Henderson reduced registration management workload and improved efficiency at one of their centers by almost 50 percent. The city of Newport Beach, California - another large, well-known city - also uses RecWare Safari to automate operations for its 300+ acres of parks and beaches.
RecWare, part of The Active Network, has provided award-winning recreation management software solutions to the city and municipal recreation market for more than a decade. With products such as RecWare Safari, ProActive and RecNet, professionals can access the industry's best recreation management technologies to automate activity registration, facility reservation, point of sale management, league scheduling, financial management, and to offer Internet registration. To learn more about the RecWare product family, visit www.recware.com or call 1-888-732-9273. For more information about The Active Network and its network of online and offline properties, visit www.theactivenetwork.com .