Victoria’s Wyndham City Council has taken out the first of four inaugural customer Innovation Awards presented by ECM solutions provider Objective at its at its annual Collaborate 2016 user conference, held in Sydney this week.

The local government authority’s Planning Approval Automation project was recognised. It incorporates Objective Trapeze extended to Objective ECM Workflow and Objective Connect, enabling electronic submission of planning applications and a seamless electronic workflow across all departments in the referral process.

This also enables customers to have immediate access to electronic plans rather than waiting for hardcopies. The project highlights a true collaborative effort between multiple departments and their customers while ensuring full information management governance.

Wyndham is now achieving large reductions in printing volumes and electronic document management has been introduced for large scale documents that were previously stored as hard copies, as well as achieving reduced postage, storage and printing costs. Overall efficiencies have increased and the volume of plans being processed has increased by 400%, with the ability to accurately stamp a 90-page document in just 30 seconds.

In recognition of the partnership between Objective and Microsoft, Michael Gration, Director, Public Sector, Microsoft Australia, presented Wyndham City Council with its second award, the Microsoft Award for Excellence, for building its centralised Project Management Office (PMO).

Wyndham had already begun to utilise Microsoft Office365 to build dashboards and reports for other applications, with positive feedback from customers. The project team saw an opportunity to leverage technology they already owned in Microsoft and Objective. Project Governance benefits are already evident including increased time efficiency, enhanced consultation and decision making, improved risk management and greater accountability.

The council’s Engineering Development team has already reported an increased processing capacity, managing 300 customer requests to over 1000 approvals for the month of June alone. Time spent processing building applications has reduced to just 40 hours annually, down from 640 hours per year.

Also recognised at the customer Innovation Awards night was Queensland utility Unitywater for its Information Management Project and the Australian Navy Fleet Air Arm (FAA) for its Information Governance and Reporting project.

Unitywater adopted a new way of thinking, moving from a 'Records Management' view to 'Enterprise Information Management' perspective. For the first time, Unitywater have a whole of business view of information, with an Executive and a Board that is aware and informed about Information Governance which is expected to save them approximately $1.4M (1% OPEX) each year. 

The Australian Navy FAA provides all maritime aviation capabilities to the Australian Navy and is responsible for ensuring safe and airworthy integration of the aviation capability into the Fleet’s warships. For past 3 months, over 3,000 pieces of correspondence have been dealt with through Objective ECM. The number is increasing as workflows are deployed to support air worthiness, safety and training related documents and the business processes used to manage them.

For the first time, the Command Element has full visibility of the volume of administrative work across the FAA and they can confidently report to their Admirals and peers on their responsiveness, efficiency and effectiveness. Reporting has allowed the efficient location and follow up of documents without the registry staff having to "walk the halls" to locate overdue or specific documents. It is expected that this has delivered a 10% saving in effort and provided a significantly enhanced level of confidence that information is not being mishandled.

The Process Governance award was presented to the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (DPC) South Australia for its Parliamentary Briefings project. DPC wanted to create a best practice electronic process that would allow the management of Parliamentary Briefings including:  document authoring, review, approval and the production process. Given the time-critical nature of most briefing types (being required for specific meetings or parliamentary sitting dates), this places significant time pressure on the 140 authors, reviewers and approvers.

Process improvements have allowed greater time to concentrate on quality control with a fully automated and digital process and an audit trail for document movements and accountability. Most importantly, the State’s lead agency for innovation has been able to save time and improve efficiency rates with a paperless process in line with the Premier’s Digital by Default declaration.

“It’s important to recognise the innovation and success of projects across the public sector and other regulated industries in such an exciting period of digital transformation,” said Tony Walls, CEO of Objective Corporation. “Objective is empowering our customers to enable great governance driving better business, helping them to deliver better services to the community at a lower cost. With the introduction of the Innovation Awards we hope to showcase the many ways organisations can put information to work, so they can get back to business.”