Party and Events

ApEX Marquee Accreditation programme Chicken Or The Egg?

Back in 2019 the association started and developed a programme that promoted the use of high quality marquee companies and erecting professionals.

aPEx IS thE Brand name of this programme and in early 2020 it was released subject to a few finishing touches. Then along came bloody COVID which ultimately stalled the events sector. So, because of the uncertainty around future gatherings it was decided to park it. Over the last two months however, the Association has secured the services of the industry stalwart, Greg Ward, to help reignite and kick start the programme again. Greg was well involved in the original build of the Best Practice Guideline and associated documentation. We have got most things back on track and have started communicating again with the likes of Fire and Emergency NZ and the Building Officials Institute of NZ (Building Inspectors and Managers in councils). The golden egg of the programme is to get a couple of exemptions for accredited companies such as Fire evacuation plan prior approvals and exemptions (established) and exemption for building consent for any sized constructed marquee that is up for less than a month. Getting these exemptions in place provides massive competitive advantages to an accredited member. This is the Chicken or the Egg issue. Does the chicken come first to lay the egg, or do we need an egg to get the chicken? Hold onto your hat’s folks and careful of the pie, but we have got this nutted out! We as a group of marquee companies need to get credibility for the programme to prove it worthy of having the “golden egg” of building consent exemption. In other words, the chicken must make a nest to look after the egg before the egg is laid. As I write, Greg is touching base with all our members with marquees to get them to sign up. From there we will assist the applicant in getting their business operating as close as possible to best practice and build an improvement/auditing system to show the company is aligned with these procedures. If we can show this position, it will make the decision to grant us the exemption so much easier as we have removed the risk from councils. So get behind this programme, it’s only open to HIANZ Members but it will allow you to measure your business against Best Practice guidelines and help your company grow. In addition to this we are planning installer training days during the Winter period leading into Spring, These have been designed to train our install teams in established quality erecting methods. ■