Stratford-on-Avon District Council serves approximately 114,000 individuals of a large rural area in the middle of England. It provides services related to housing, recreation and tourism, planning and economic development, environmental health, refuse collection and council taxes.

The Challenge

Like most local government organisations in the UK, the Council has to perform a critical juggling act - improving efficiency and effectiveness, while controlling costs.
 
Recognizing the need to streamline processes and comply with central government’s push towards 100 percent electronic delivery of services, the Council has sought to implement a large number of business process automation initiatives across the organisation.

The Solution

However, the gulf between recognising a need and successfully implementing solutions can be immense. Where to start and how to move from concepts and objectives towards the realisation of those desired benefits? For help with this they turned to Coordinatis and their broad experience in this area.

Using Document Capture and Document Management technologies the Council has moved to storing all its documents online and immediately accessible by staff across different departments. Custom-written components have also enabled output from line-of-business systems and external agencies to be automatically captured into the system, as well as enabling users to call up documents from within existing systems by image-enabling them.

Dave Webb, who oversees implementation of the council’s process automation initiatives, comments: "Documents can now be quickly and easily accessed from the desktop and because paper records do not have to be stored or photocopied, we are also saving money." Webb adds: "but perhaps the most significant saving is that staff time is being used more efficiently. That time previously spent hunting for files and documents - which used to take up to one day a week of each member of staff's time - can now be spent dealing with the tasks in hand.

As well as storing and retrieving documents more effectively, the council also recognised the need to process them more efficiently. They began to look at Business Process Management (BPM) solutions. They knew that many of their processes involved the handling of paper forms and thus any solution had to include a comprehensive electronic forms capability. “We needed a process automation system where we, as the District Council, could rapidly and efficiently interact with citizens as well as process forms effectively through the various council departments,” explained Dave Webb.

After identifying benchmark criteria and evaluating several options, the District Council selected Cardiff Software's LiquidOffice™ business process management solution. LiquidOffice enables organizations to design, execute and optimise automated processes. Processes can include one or more electronic forms, displayed in PDF, HTML or InfoPath format, and the system allows users to easily initiate, take part in and track processes via a web-based interface.

Nick Marsh, Managing Director of Coordinatis, expanded: "Unlike many competing solutions, LiquidOffice takes an open standards approach to ensure scalability and interoperability - both of which are of utmost importance to government organizations who must maximize their existing resources while complying with present-day and evolving mandates and protecting against obsolescent systems."

Dave Webb added. "Return on investment, increased productivity, reduced operating costs and data errors, and flexibility and development potential were all important criteria in selecting a final solution. Cardiff had a proven track record in all these areas. The other solutions did not provide the flexibility and development potential we needed or were weak in the usability area."

The implementation began with Coordinatis designing a pilot set of internal forms and training up the Council’s staff. These individuals have now gone on to implement solutions that touch a wide range of council activities. For more complex processes, CoCoordinatis have provided consultancy to analyse existing processes, propose solutions and then implement them.

One area of particular importance to the council was integration with their existing Document Capture and Document Management activities. Coordinatis’s Marsh comments: “The extensibility of LiquidOffice meant we were able to develop an integration linking LiquidOffice to the Council’s Document Management system. Forms generated as part of a process can be automatically exported as PDF files to this system for archival and later retrieval. We also developed a link that enables new processes to be automatically started when certain types of document are scanned using the Document Capture software - for example when a new Benefit Claim for is received.”

The Results

These changes have already enabled the Council to start meeting government efficiency targets and move forward with process improvements. Costs savings have been made, staff more efficiently utilised, filing storage space reduced, response times improved and collaboration increased.

"We are using our resources better," says Webb. "By reducing manual and administrative processes, our staff can assist the public better and provide more consultation and higher quality service. In the Benefits area alone we expect that LiquidOffice will reduce the processing time of new applications for benefits by seven days, which will enable us to provide payments or resolution to the public faster."

Webb has also noticed a new mindset among the Council's 350 employees. "The implementation of LiquidOffice has created a huge awareness at all levels within the Council of how to improve business processes," Webb observed. "They already see that it can eliminate mundane aspects of their jobs. But most important, it has generated debates about how to improve the way we do things."