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Government - Winchester City Council
ENABLING FUTURE GROWTH THROUGH TRUE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
ORGANISATIONAL PROFILE
Winchester City Council
Back in 2010, Winchester City Council decided to take action to advance their current process. The Council was losing over £4,000 a year due to existing printers consistently breaking down and high maintenance costs. At the time, they only printed reports, individual bills and housing benefit letters. Any amendments to the document design usually required assistance from the printing company, which meant delays in production time. The documents were merged by hand, adding more time to production.
Before
THE ISSUES
At the first stage in the process, data was provided to the individual departments. The local authority wanted to be able to easily produce a merged document that included both the bill and the benefit slip. The ability of staff to design individual documents without assistance was very important to the Council.
The project was then phased in, initially merging reports and bills and designing invoice templates. After some intuitive workflows were created to best suit its process needs, Winchester City Council went live, just one month after purchasing the solution!
Objectives
Once the first stage was established and secure, the second stage was to review all additional existing processes and increase the use of automation throughout the business. Anything that was manually processed – from pre-sorting bills to pre-sorting recovery documents – was automated.
At the end of 2010, Winchester City Council decided to look into merging the year-end housing rent increase letter and the benefit letter. Usually three individual letters were sent, entailing three separate printing and posting costs as well as three individual phone calls to follow the letter. This was not only inefficient for Winchester, but was a costly and unnecessary process.
By successfully merging their documents and consolidating their mail, they saved a vast amount of time and money.
Now
THE BENEFITS
- A4 leaflets are now created on their document management system and are automated to attach when necessary, saving storage space and eliminating waste. The quality of their documents has increased, reducing customer complaints.
- Year-end bills produced for internal, departmental or county use are then emailed and barcodes are used for the additional documents that need to be mailed for ease of insertion.
- Now Winchester can assist the electoral registration by easily inserting a document into the existing envelope, encouraging citizens to notify the office of any changes of address or other important information.
- Considerable time and money is saved when creating landlord statements. Now they are emailed to the landlord with a copy of the statement and additional data file.
- All pre-printed stationery has been eliminated, reducing the need for storage space and diminishing waste costs when details are changed on letterheads, housing benefit letters, etc.
- Total savings achieved in a three-month period by removing paper, improving landlord statements and eliminating leaflets was more than £5,000.
The Impact
“Since purchasing Connect, we have achieved so much. All our working practices within Revenues Administration have been streamlined, and documents are automatically emailed to departments or customers. We have been able to eliminate the different paper styles and we now just use plain paper, reducing storage space and printing costs. Connect allowed us to merge data from different back office systems, removing the need for manual intervention and reducing postal costs. The system is intuitive and a person with limited IT skills can create a template and workflow quite easily. In addition, any amendments can be made simply.”
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