Whakatane District Council
“By documenting Council processes and providing access to information from one official location, staff can now find all the information they need quickly and easily, resulting in savings in both time and money.”
Lynda Burch, Project Manager, Whakatane District Council
Council Name
Whakatane District Council
Introduction
They have 160 staff and cover 4,500 square kilometres. They handle everything that local government handles including roading, waste water, animal control, planning and resource consent.
Overview
Whakatane District Council works in a highly legislative environment. The Local Government Act is just one of many it must comply with.
Situation prior to Mavim
The Council is made up of 130 staff, many of whom have valuable experience and knowledge about legislative requirements.
As these staff move on, their knowledge goes with them and this can have a significant impact on the Council’s ability to comply with legislation.
The Council’s goal was to capture all of its information, both formal and informal, and have it stored in such a way that anyone in the organisation could quickly and easily find anything they wanted.
Challenges
There has been a high loss of institutional knowledge as contractors and new staff have all brought their own procedures each adding to the confusion.
The main challenge is getting staff to understand processes better with information mapping being a key component.
Capturing & disseminating information quickly to all staff has proven difficult in the past
Introduction of Mavim to the business
After investigating possible solutions, the Council chose to employ the services of Lynda Burch to design and develop a sustainable Process Improvement Structure.
Mavim was selected for its ease of use, its ability to connect with intranets, a future Document Management System, a local government suite (Origen Ozone), and its ability to provide access to information from a single location.
Lynda managed the project and developed the process framework to capture, document and publish the business processes. To ensure project continuity and sustainability, she developed and trained a team of Process Mappers from the organisation to continue working within the Business Process Framework.
Outcome from using Mavim
Many of the Council processes are now being captured, improved and documented throughout the organisation. One of the greatest benefits is that multiple Mappers are able to work simultaneously, thanks to the Mavim software.
By documenting processes and providing access to the information via one official location, new and existing staff can now access the latest information quickly and easily.
Other Benefits
The software’s ‘search’ facility enables staff to find the information they need quickly and easily. New staff are up and running much more quickly and are achieving more accurate results.
Keeping information current is much easier with Mavim and updates are made at the click of a button, throughout the entire system. This reduces overheads and eliminates the confusion that comes with having multiple versions of documents.
Implementing new systems is faster and more accurate now that Mavim has been introduced and the software is so flexible, all the information can be organised to suit.
Direct Cost Savings and future considerations
The Council is planning to implement quality standards in the next phase. With the processes now mapped it will be a simple matter of applying the standards to them, which will result in direct cost savings.
Secure access to Council processes by external organisations is also now one step closer.
