Published on Wednesday, 18 September 2019 at 11:16:00 AM
The situation
Located in Melbourne’s outer South-East, the City of Casey is Victoria’s largest Municipality and is home to approximately 300,000 residents. The City of Casey wanted to improve the handling of council business papers. Their aim was to implement a software solution that was flexible and could automate the process of creating agendas and minutes and producing reports. Improving efficiencies through effective digital solutions, the City was keen to get more from their intellectual property, being their reports, and enable a process of linking their resolutions and actions together. Creating this link meant greater visibility of the process that results in a council plan.
Selection process
During the selection process, the City of Casey went on a journey of ‘activity-based working’ and were looking at measures that they could implement to become a ‘smart city’. At the same time, they had moved into a new office complex, Bunzl Place. The City had a previous system that wasn’t working for them and were eager to find a product that would fulfil their needs.
The City of Casey prepared an RFQ and embarked on a tender process. Internally they involved key stakeholders to formulate the concept to ensure major details were covered.
“With much change happening simultaneously, we were keen to ensure that the solution for automating agenda and minutes management covered the needs of the organisation across departments. The Harbour Software Doc Assembler and Docs on Tap products ticked the boxes for us in terms of our needs.”
Rhys Matulis
Team Leader Governance City of Casey.
The Brief and development
The City of Casey chose the Doc Assembler and Docs on Tap Products to fulfil their requirements, the solution needed to:
- Be an out of the box software solution that integrates with existing core systems
- Automate agenda and minutes
- Improve council document handling processes
- Reduce council dependence on paper documents
- Allow access to important documents digitally in an easy and timely fashion
- Allow access to documents on hand held devices
- Include due date notifications for reports
Harbour Software supported the City of Casey through the journey from design and contract preparations to implementation and training. Utilising our expertise and industry experience we were able to develop customised templates specific to their needs and provide guidance on using the software to aid the City to improve their processes. Working closely with the City of Casey we focused on assisting them to get the most out of our software and ensure that all their needs were met.
Success
The City of Casey had a change management plan in place to ensure they achieved an ordered and successful implementation and user take up.
Working collaboratively with the City of Casey, Harbour Software looked to train champion users first. These champion users had previously been involved in the development phase which meant they had a sense of ownership and pre-existing investment in the success of the software implementation.
“The Harbour Software solution has proven to be a much sought-after tool internally. In fact, excitement by staff for the product has been such that the City of Casey has had to slow the user take-up to ensure that the rollout plan is maintained and that training is provided in a methodical fashion first.
Our experience with Harbour Software has been smooth and the extra value add has been immense, evidenced by the delivery of customised templates that suit our specific requirements. Once our people saw the product they loved it as they could see how easy it is to use and they could recognise the value it brought to their workflow improvements.
Harbour Software has provided a timely and professional service. Their previous experience with Local Government Authorities meant they could speak our language and were able to guide us effectively through the development and implementation process.”
Rhys Matulis
Team Leader Governance City of Casey.
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