April 1, 2010
After a long and thorough evaluation process, Waitaki District Council has chosen to replace its aging software with Civica's Authority local government enterprise solution.
Risk management was a major factor considered during the evaluation and Council is confident of a long term business partnership with Civica. The investment will bring Council's business processes and services online, which they see as a key step to meeting the service expectations of a growing community.
Waitaki’s evaluation process involved an extensive market survey resulting in a short-list of three vendors: Civica, Origin and Technology One.
"Civica was clearly our favoured partner,” said Stephen Halliwell, Waitaki Council's Group Manager of Corporate Services. “We preferred the fundamental structure of Civica's database, especially the fact that key information about people and properties could be held as data in one place while being used right across Council. Ten years ago that would have been a fantasy, but Civica demonstrated that it has become reality – and is up and working, and reliable."
He added: “Civica's stability was a major factor in our risk assessment. The company offers scale as well as having considerable investment in the ongoing development of their local government applications, which gave us confidence that the Authority solution is going to deliver benefits to Council both now and in the future.”
“The culture and attitude of Civica's people was such that our staff could see they would be happy to work with them,” he said. "They were not just a bunch of sales people whom we would never see again the minute we signed on the dotted line. They were clearly personally committed to the future of the project."
Go-live for phase 1, scheduled for November this year, will comprise Authority’s Financials, CRM, Applications and Registers, and Revenue and Property applications.
When Authority is operational Council will benefit from greater efficiency, especially from using a single database. This contrasts with the seven or eight different databases currently in use, which often results in lost or mismanaged information.
At present, if a customer changes address, the details need to be entered into all relevant databases. With Authority, details need be entered only once, yet will be accessible throughout all Council areas.
Authority’s flexibility will also enable Council to adapt the system to reflect future changes in business processes. Stephen Halliwell foresees that this will result in improved reporting quality, which in turn will enable better quality decision-making across all of Council’s business areas.
From a customer perspective, services will be improved as Council gains a better understanding of individuals' complete relationships with Council. Eventually customers and businesses will be able to interface with Council via Council’s website, which Stephen says "will make a big difference to the level of services Council offers". Currently customers can interface on a very limited level.
Waitaki is a rural district in Otago, on the East coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Most of the 20,000 population live in the town of Oamaru, whose numbers have expanded by 5 per cent in recent years. Lately there has been large investment in water, which has brought a dairy boom and attracted more jobs to the district, helping Waitaki to survive the global recession in good shape. However, growth has highlighted the challenge of managing growing expectations of service levels, and the Authority application is expected to play a key role in meeting these challenges.
Currently there is further growth potential from a $300 million investment in a cement plant. The application for this is going through the consent process and if it goes ahead, the new plant will become a major employer in the region.