Dunedin is experiencing rapid population growth, five times faster than the national average over the past decade. Quality of life is a big part of the appeal – in a recent survey 90% of Dunedin residents rated their lives as ‘good, very good or extremely good’.
The Dunedin City Council is working hard to maintain that reputation by providing outstanding facilities and services for its residents. And in recent years those services have improved even further – with help from Datacom – thanks to new systems that make it easier to book local spaces and get faster responses from mobile officers.
The Council is responsible for more than 100 parks, reserves, recreation areas and sports fields. Adding it all up, there are more than 21,000 bookable resources in the region – and digitising the booking system has transformed the way the public interacts with these spaces.
Under the old system, users would send an email to the Council, describing a location in the hope of booking it. With a huge backlog of queries and no adequate system to deal with them, a response would usually only come the week before the event. In the meantime, people calling and emailing to chase up their bookings created considerable work for Council staff.
With help from Datacom, the Council introduced the Datascape online bookings solution. With the booking system, users can see all the available locations and book online, getting a response within minutes.
“When this went live, bookings increased by 30% almost overnight,” says Rachel Dixie, Project Manager.
“People found out about facilities they didn’t even know were available. For instance, they could organise a BBQ at a park for a kid’s party, which they’d known they could do before. On some locations, we got more bookings in the first week via the system than we had in the previous three months. It shows what a really usable product this is from a customer point of view.”
It wasn’t only a success for customers. By cutting booking processing time from 15 minutes to four, and by operating 24/7, it’s freed up the equivalent of 1.5 full-time employees to work on more important tasks.
Also in need of improvement was the data input system for the Council’s seven animal control officers (ACOs). It previously took up to 12 days to respond to complaints or request, with ACOs hampered by the need to physically diarise their work and come back to the office regularly to input data.
Datacom and the Council worked together to come up with a practical solution: Datascape Mobile Capture purpose-built software for local government, fully integrated with the Council’s own systems. With Datascape Mobile Capture, paper diaries were swapped for tablets so ACOs can now remain on the road, typing up notes and submitting them directly. Witness and victim statements can be taken and signed via functionality built into Datascape Mobile Capture. Now the information is far more up to date, and response times have been cut to one day. As an added bonus, fuel use has dropped considerably.
“Our ACOs are able to get to the dogs faster, which means less stress on a dog that’s wandering around. They can work to get that dog back home as quickly as possible, which is always our first priority. We try to find the owner immediately, and having up-to-date data on hand helps with that,” says Paula Cotter, Business Analyst.
“The officers really appreciate how much easier their job is, and they like being able to stay on the road and not come into the office. The turnaround has been fantastic.”
The Council has been working with Datacom since 2017 and these two projects are part of a wider movement for mobility and flexibility. With hundreds of various types of officers around the city doing their jobs, it’s invaluable to be able to input and upload data in the field.
“The integration with our systems is the hardest bit,” says Paula. “But Datacom has taken the time to create a mobile friendly interface with the functionality we need, specifically designed to our requirements. Mobile officers can send and receive live real-time updates, rather than passing information back to an admin person who would copy and paste it into our system. This is a huge improvement in our process.”
These two projects by the Dunedin City Council are perfect examples of how tailored solutions can work brilliantly at a community level.
“Connecting individuals more closely to their local council is giving them an excellent user experience, with fast responses online and in the field,” says Georgina Johnson GM Sales ANZ – Local Government.
“Plus, of course, there are huge efficiency gains for the teams in council, which lets them focus on delivering superlative services for local people, businesses and spaces.”
Next on the list for Dunedin City Council will be adding more places to the booking system and finding ways to connect additional officers to job-specific apps that allow them to do their jobs far more efficiently.
“There’s a big interest in IT down here and we’re always looking to the future,” says Rachel. “These new systems are all part of our strategic vision for mobility and our overall business improvement strategy.”
