With the need to increase the amount of productive time in the field for its Waste Management team’s mobile workers, New Zealand’s Hutt City Council (HCC) has turned to TechnologyOne’s new mobile offer.
The Council aimed to reduce paperwork, improve service quality and provide a significant increase in productive time through scheduling work orders while on the go.

The Council, which services a community of more than 100,000 people, deployed the TechnologyOne Mobile solution in under four weeks as part of a phased implementation strategy, with plans to extend mobile capabilities to other departments.

The Council initially focused on ways to streamline renewal payments and licenses for the trade waste team, which is responsible for inspecting, monitoring and issuing licenses to more than 600 sites each year.
The team also assesses environmental, health and trade standards and enforces local by-laws.
HCC Manager of IS Projects, Tony Skerrett, said the mobile technology had streamlined the team’s outputs and reduced the backlog of inspections.

“The TechnologyOne Mobile solution has greatly improved the way the trade waste team operates. Officers no longer need to be in the Council building to input data on specific sites, log information or flag areas for action,” he said.

“Since going live, the high level of integration between the office and mobile workers has already saved 150 hours on administration, meaning Council officers can spend more time doing their jobs and less time travelling and sitting behind a desk.

“We envisage that the ability to start and end work in the field, rather than at the office, will lead to ongoing cost savings.”
The new mobile offering allows inspection officers to access a full database of sites from a handheld mobile device enabling information and images to be updated quickly and easily. These records are then instantly integrated with the TechnologyOne solutions back in the office, removing the need for paperwork and onerous data entry.

In this instance, the mobile inspections solution interacts directly with the back end Property & Rating solution, which covers all aspects of councils’ interaction with the community such as building consents, animal inspections, trade waste management and water billing, rates and a raft of other regulatory functions.

The TechnologyOne Property & Rating Mobile solution allows workflow items and inspections to be completed in real time and onsite, reducing the administrative double handling and ensuring data accuracy, security and relevance.

Mr Skerrett said the other benefit Hutt City Council had gained from using TechnologyOne Mobile solutions was the improvement in the quality and accuracy of the data.

“We have found there are huge benefits to be gained by taking an approach that considers the end to end solution from software to hardware and are delighted with the results so far,” he said.

“The Council has already received interest from other internal departments who are keen to become involved in our mobile technology journey.”

TechnologyOne Executive Chairman, Adrian Di Marco, said the highly integrated TechnologyOne Mobile solution was ideal for supporting offsite workers and had been developed to help organisations work smarter.

“The value of a sophisticated mobile solution is measured through its ability to quickly improve processes and productivity, deliver a superior user experience and enable offsite workers to work more efficiently,” Mr Di Marco said.

“It is about lightening the load so workers can do what they need to do while also ensuring the data is replicated in the back office system to avoid unnecessary duplications.

“Mobile devices bypass the delays by having the data displayed or collected at the point at which it is needed so the information can be relayed rapidly back to the enterprise systems for fast processing.

“The TechnologyOne Mobile solutions are used by a diverse range of occupations within our customer organisations including all levels of government and utility companies.”