Councils throughout Australia are moving steadily towards a new business model that fully embraces the Internet to deliver information and services to customers, suppliers and staff. Sanderson is leading the e-productivity race with its Authority e-Services solution. This is an enterprise wide system that facilitates full end to end electronic service delivery for both Council to business and Council to citizen communication.
Interestingly, the online applications that Councils have adapted so far are quite diverse. The City of South Perth in Western Australia went live with e-Services in July 2001. Launching Internet rate payments as the initial phase of an online strategy, it collected $850,000 in rate payments via its web site during the first month of operation.
“The community take up completely exceeded our expectations,” said Director of Financial Services, Mike Kent “We have seen a dramatic decrease in front counter activity without a single queue during this rates collection period. Our customers have enjoyed the convenience of this payment method and our staff are now available to deliver additional services at this busy time.”
South Perth is quickly extending the scope of e-Services to include fully interactive ‘real time’ online services, such as lodging building applications, performing property enquiries and submitting customer requests directly to relevant Council officers.
The range of e-Services that the City of Whittlesea in Victoria currently offer, include Internet payments, applications for Land Information (LI) Certificates and allowing registered users to access their own details. Council will shortly make available to the public the Customer Request transaction and they are targeting making LI Certificates available online. Specifications have also been written to deliver e-Service transactions in the Animal Management area as well as the Planning, Subdivision and Building applications. The e-Services have been well accepted by the community and continue to be a focus of Council’s improvement effort.
One of South Australia’s largest metropolitan sites, the City of Tea Tree Gully, had a similarly positive response from its community. Council collected $48,000 in the first 10 days of operation, even though the rates were not due for two months. The City’s IT Manager, Brian Strawbridge, sees Authority e-Services as a means of offering improved service to all who deal with Council, as well as boosting staff productivity.
“e-Services allows customers to deal with us on their terms rather than ours,” he said. “Information and services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which may be a lot more convenient and faster than calling or visiting Council personally.”
The Shire of Esperance in Western Australia has focused on the development of intranet applications to distribute financial reports and budgeting information to various departments via Council’s Intranet. Esperance initiated the system to help management monitor and review expenditure and income against budget projections.
“We realised that traditionally accounting systems have been very good at collecting, sorting and analysing information, but not at distributing it,” said Esperance’s Executive Manager Financial Services, Paul Breman. “It occurred to us that the Intranet would be an ideal distribution vehicle since our staff were already familiar with the use of web browsers.”
Port Augusta City Council in South Australia has implemented e-Procurement, after running in test mode for three months.
“We are looking forward to the efficiencies e-Procurement will bring to a Council suffering the tyranny of distance, some 300 kilometres away from the State capital, Adelaide,” said Mike Dunemann, Director Financial & Information Services. “Many of our major suppliers are based in Adelaide and the benefits of transacting this business online will be really significant.”
Council is also providing rates and debtors payments, miscellaneous payments, such as childcare fees, and online customer action requests via Authority e-Services. Council is also using e-Services to handle some Internet-based functions related to inhouse policies, strategic plans and Council’s corporate structure. It is also being trialled with online forms, such as annual leave applications for staff use.
Mike Dunemann said that Port Augusta believes Sanderson’s online solution offers more than most others.
“Authority e-Services is a little bit special because it is a truly end to end solution, while others require downloading of payment details,” he said. “In contrast, our customers and business partners can make payments in real time. Ratepayers and debtors see what they actually owe and select which invoices to pay – the system is a fair bit more sophisticated than most of the others available today.”
For more information please visit www.sanderson.net.au.
* Copy supplied by Sanderson Australia
