Shellharbour City Council SaaS Solution

The streamlined path to SaaS delivered by TechnologyOne helped Shellharbour City Council achieve a secure, connected system that drives agility and efficiency.

“By partnering with AWS, we are able to deliver Shellharbour City Council the ability to rapidly scale, and a superior level of security to an on-premise environment," said Daniel Sultana, Director of TechnologyOne’s SaaS Platform.

“Council is still relatively young in our transition and can see the benefits appearing already with a robust business continuity solution a key outcome for Council,” Ms Taylor said.

“Real-time access to information means Council can better make informed decisions, deliver more efficient customer service, and reduce manual, paper-based processes.”

Ms Taylor added that giving staff ‘any time, anywhere’ access to information has meant the community benefits from more effective facilities management, improved scheduling of works, streamlined operations and enhanced service delivery. A number of services were also digitised to allow customers to self-serve.

Council now has greater visibility of the cost of asset management by running financial enquiries through Ci Anywhere.

“Now that our system is integrated, Council can raise work orders and we can see the direct costs that are associated with a particular asset.

“You can see over the course of its life, how much that asset actually costs the council and forecast what it's likely to cost in the future,” Ms Taylor said.

Seamlessly linking Human Resources & Payroll with OneCouncil has simplified Council’s people management and payroll functions, and allowed employees to manage timesheets and apply for leave online.

The SaaS model has given Shellharbour City Council a holistic view of its organisation and an informed and mobile workforce. It is better equipped to deliver quality outcomes across what it calls the ‘Four Cs’: customer, community, councillors and council.

“Council’s services teams have been positively impacted by the transformation with field workers able to access a fully functioning work order system on tablet devices,” Adele Taylor said.

“Previously staff would fill out details on paper, and then re-enter the work order information when they came back into the office to say the tree was prune, for example. Now staff are doing that in real-time, on site.

“One major benefit is that field staff can immediately report a defect. They may be four hours away from the office, but the defect can be logged straight away so that another crew can attend to the issue.”

Making self-service functions available to Council’s ratepayers, business customers, and the broader community—in addition to streamlined back-end processes—has led to more efficient service delivery.

“Customers can lodge applications online, request services, pay for rates and receive various other notices, as well as access our public mapping and spatial data via TechnologyOne’s IntraMaps solution,” Ms Taylor said.

Ms Taylor said that in light of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, it was a significant advantage to be able to empower staff work from home on any device.

“With a SaaS ERP solution, as long as you have an internet connection and a laptop, you can effectively work remotely,” she said.

“The Human Resources & Payroll solution also provides staff with online and mobile access to timesheet and leave functions, which has reduced data entry associated with paper timesheets for our Payroll staff.”