Tech upgrade delivers lift in council services

Bass Coast Shire — located in Victoria’s Gippsland, 130 km south-east of Melbourne — is one of the state’s fastest growing rural municipalities. The council supports more than 40,000 residents and 3.4 million visitors — many of whom come for the world-famous Phillip Island — each year.

The area has been on the receiving end of the COVID-induced sea change, with many residents moving to the coastal shire since the beginning of the pandemic and during Melbourne’s successive lockdowns.

Residents and visitors can now interact with the council 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thanks to a new, easy-to-navigate online customer portal available anytime, anywhere and from any device, thanks to TechnologyOne.

The council’s field teams have seen notable benefits too. The upgrade has replaced manual timesheets for 70 staff members, who are often on the road. Now they can easily enter updates as they go, rather than at the end of a shift, and without having to go back to the office.

In addition, Bass Coast has increased the number of services offered online — from six to more than 40 — and enabled for the consolidation of six IT platforms to one, creating a single ‘source of truth’ for information and better connecting employees, field workers and customers.

“The customer is at the centre of everything we do,” said Ali Wastie, Chief Executive Officer of Bass Coast Shire Council.

“This digital transformation is about modernising our IT systems to help us be more effective and deliver better services to our growing community.”

“Residents can engage with the council on any issue that is important to them — whether it’s planning, the environment, a community group, or making a rate or animal registration payment — in a way that works for their individual needs,” added Wayne Mack, General Manager of Business Transformation at Bass Coast.

Problems with its existing IT infrastructure were impacting the council’s ability to respond to growth. It used six different software applications which were not well integrated, meaning information was often duplicated, doubted or not easily available in real time.

In addition, the systems were on-premise, meaning upgrades were complex and time-consuming and the organisation was saddled with the cost of buying and maintaining equipment for a computer data centre that had become an unwelcome drag on the finances.

Most importantly, the time, effort and cost involved in making changes had become a barrier to innovation. Bass Coast needed to move to a new technology platform that was both fit for purpose today and could provide a flexible foundation for its future.

A TechnologyOne customer since 2016, the council implemented a digital transformation project that included upgrading key systems — including finance, budgeting, supply chain, asset management and request management — to the company’s OneCouncil software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.

“The upgrade allowed us to bring many different systems together and at the same time eliminate manual processes. Our teams are now doing work that benefits the community, rather than pushing paper and entering the same data in multiple places,” Mack said.

“We went from offering six services online to 40, covering almost every aspect of council’s operations. As a result, we’ve seen the number of customer requests coming in digitally increase from one or two a day to now closer to 80.

“Now that the council is connected to residents through the portal there is complete visibility of resident requests, from the time a request is entered through to a crew member in the field completing the work, all using one seamless end-to-end process.

“As well as giving a better customer experience, the new system better allows us to manage and act on those requests. Under the previous system, every request would generate four separate emails to various departments. Now it’s all a single workflow,” he said.

Requests can range from inspecting drains to make sure there are no blockages that may lead to overflowing or flooding, to planting trees and tending to gardens in local neighbourhoods. With the requests all in one place, accessible anywhere, anytime, the field team can get through more.

“We’re able to support flexible and remote working; people can work anywhere at any time, which better suits their needs. It allows our employees to focus on doing more value-add work for our customers,” Mack said.

Image credit: iStock.com/putilich