Long-standing SAP customer Christchurch City Council has turned again to the vendor – this time, on a complete digital transformation to move it into the cloud.
The New Zealand council has a wide remit, managing requests from 380,000 citizens across a range of issues including road repairs, graffiti removal and animal management. With 11 different legacy systems in place, integration was a challenge and made it difficult to mine, organise and action incoming data. Receiving requests, issuing work orders and despatching field service teams to action the requests and provide feedback to citizens was a complex and manual process.
With the aim of creating a better experience for its employees and citizens, the council wanted to not only move business processes to the cloud, but also streamline its back-office processes to integrate with omnichannel experiences.
Over the past decade, Christchurch City Council has been focusing on re-energising its transformation programmes to become a modern, mobile and innovative organisation,” said Michael Day, finance systems transformation lead at Christchurch City Council. “As a long-term SAP customer, when we were looking to move to the cloud, SAP won out as the solution of choice. We knew this was a vital step in bringing Christchurch’s citizen and staff experience into the 21st century.”
Together with SAP, the council has implemented SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, the SAP Customer Experience Citizen Engagement Accelerator, as well as an SAP C/4HANA implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, which has enabled the council to seamlessly manage requests from a variety of channels including mobile, and automatically generate work orders via its ERP system.
Dana Burnett, My Council Programme Manager at Christchurch City Council, said a key focus was providing citizens with a range of communication channels to choose from when dealing with the council.
“With the deployment of SAP Customer Experience solutions, we’ve developed a digital interface for citizen engagement with the Council. Users can now pay for or log requests for services via the website or mobile application, using the integrated camera on a mobile device to capture an image of the issue such as a pothole,” said Burnett. “Citizens are more empowered, as they now have the ability to elect if and how they want to receive feedback.”
With the integration of SAP Service Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud and Christchurch City Council’s Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a mapping tool, citizens can now drop pins on the exact location on a map when reporting an incident. This improves the accuracy of citizen requests and is helping the council plan for future environmental development.
“The SAP technology integrated with GIS uses logic to recommend the most appropriate allocation of services and teams to action the problem. It also streamlines inbound requests and work orders by enabling our customer service representatives to identify duplication of reports. It can even enable customer service reps to predict where a graffiti artist may tag next based on a pattern of reports,” said Burnett.
The council now plans to integrate its ERP systems with SAP S/4HANA to improve organisational efficiency and agility, as well as deploy SAP SuccessFactors to improve and streamline its HR processes.
“Our data-led strategy has already drastically improved our ability to develop future plans and make more strategic decisions so that we can achieve our vision of being truly citizen-centric,” said Day.
