No storm in this port
No storm in this port
Examining how one South Australian local authority managed to increase document registrations by 700 percent in less than a year.
The City of Port Adelaide Enfield, situated in suburban Adelaide, was formed in 1996 when the City of Port Adelaide and City of Enfield Councils merged. The council is now one of the largest in South Australia in terms of population with close to 100,000 residents and 60,000 ratable properties.
The council area is significant to the regional economic development of South Australia and has recently announced a number of major residential and industrial projects, including the redevelopment of the Port Adelaide waterfront into a medium-density residential complex of around 2,000 dwellings. In addition, residential developments across the council territory will add another 6,000 properties over the next five to ten years.
In recent years, the City of Port Adelaide Enfield has reported an increased demand on council resources with a 25 percent rise in customer requests between 2000 and 2002. With an influx of residents and business expected over the next decade as a result of major development, that number will continue to rise.
Previously, the council had operated with separate systems for records management and customer requests.
Peter Kiley, Corporate Information Manager for City of Port Adelaide Enfield, says the council conducted a needs analysis for a new corporate information solution to replace the two existing systems.
"The initial scope of the project was to replace just the records management component, but we quickly realised the benefits of incorporating a customer requests system in the new solution.
Customer requests are simply another type of record and there was no reason why they should be managed outside the record management system."
Records Management Coordinator at City of Port Adelaide Enfield, Tammy Watson, says the existing document management system had many inherent problems that made record keeping laborious and time-consuming.
"Our legacy system wasn't electronic so everything was stored as a hard copy. We weren't capturing anywhere near the number of documents we needed to and documents couldn't be managed in the format they had been received because all records had to be converted to paper for filing. The number of hard copy files that went missing after being borrowed was unacceptable.
We needed a fully automated EDMS (electronic document management system) to address each of these issues and to help us better meet our obligations under the Records Act."
Kiley says the Council went to tender to identify an EDMS that would support its core business functions and have a strong emphasis on the monitoring and delivery of agreed service levels to internal and external stakeholders.
"For this to occur, the solution had to capture all corporate information, not just paper-based records, have a powerful workflow manager to enable the easy tracking of service standards and allow instant council-wide access to information by multiple users."
After a Request for Tender (RFT) document was released for the electronic document management solution and customer contact system components, Advanced Data Integration's DataWorks was one of the few submissions that satisfied both RFTs and was selected as the best solution for the council's needs.
Kiley explains that one of the major drivers in selecting DataWorks was its ease of integration with existing council software.
"DataWorks has been developed in such a way that we had no difficulties in integrating it with our other solutions, particularly Proclaim One by Technology One, which we installed as our new property system in October last year.
Advanced Data Integration and Technology One have worked closely to develop a particularly innovative feature that sees all documents generated in Proclaim One automatically registered in DataWorks with minimal involvement. This alone has resulted in significant time savings and improvements in efficiencies because of the workload that has been taken off our administrative staff."
Kiley also has high praise for DataWorks' workflow, which plays a key part in the council monitoring and achieving service standards.
"DataWorks' workflow is an incredibly powerful tool for us. We are able to instantly obtain actual figures and percentages on the tasks that are inside and outside the defined service standards. If we identify an area where service standards may be slipping, we can quickly assign increased resources to ensure that area meets its targets. It is this visibility of business activities that has enabled us to improve our internal and external resource allocation and improve the way we operate."
The modifications made to DataWorks to tailor it to the City of Port Adelaide Enfield's specific requirements, primarily with the workflow, were undertaken by ADI in conjunction with its South Australian reseller partner, Jigsaw Services.
Jigsaw Services also delivered training to 330 Council staff in just nine weeks, a major achievement, according to Kiley.
"To deliver consistent training to that number of people over such a short timeframe was exceptional. The adoption of the solution by the staff is a testament to the training provided by Jigsaw."
Kiley said the significance of the installation was the increased visibility of council activities and the resultant ability to make better informed strategic business decisions.Ms Watson, who has been instrumental in the success of DataWorks at the council, agrees with those sentiments.
"In the 12 months after DataWorks was installed, the number of records registered by employees went up by almost 700 percent. The old system registered 24,000 documents a year, but with DataWorks, we now register between 15,000 and 17,000 a month, approximately 185,000 documents a year.
"This is directly attributable to council employees now being able to register their own documents quickly and easily and is indicative of the amount of information that we weren't capturing before DataWorks was installed."
Kiley adds that employees are working smarter because they can quickly and easily track their performance against service standards.
"If they miss a deadline, DataWorks prompts them into action before it escalates and becomes overdue.
"For management, it has become an invaluable tool. It provides the foundation upon which we have built a robust EDMS that allows us to work smarter and continue to provide the level of service that our internal and external stakeholders have come to expect.
"I think we can safely say that we are one of the leaders in local government in South Australia in terms of our approach and commitment to managing and storing our corporate information and this wouldn't have been possible without DataWorks."
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