Highlights
300,667 residents
Land area of 957km2
Improved customer service
Saved 700 hours per year
Reduced costs by about $700,000
Logan City Council
The Council saved 700 hours per year and reduced costs by about $700,000
The Challenge
Logan City Council was seeking a business intelligence system that could exploit information from its enterprise software to improve transparency and visibility. The council also wanted to remove inefficiencies associated with manual data extraction.
"You get the most value from having an enterprise system when you are able to expose the information stored in it," said Logan City Council Finance Manager, Robert Strachan.
"We needed to improve productivity and efficiency - and the best way to do that was to deliver better, more timely information."
The Solution
Logan City Council purchased TechnologyOne's OneBI solution, which integrates with core organisational systems to provide access to real-time strategic information. OneBI provides a suite of preconfigured business intelligence dashboards, designed to meet the reporting needs of local government.
OneBI was implemented alongside the council's existing suite of TechnologyOne products, including Financials, Supply Chain, Human Resource & Payroll, Asset Management and Enterprise Budgeting.
"We needed to improve productivity and efficiency - and the best way to do that was to deliver better, more timely information."
Robert Strachan, Finance Manager
The Outcome
OneBI has allowed Council to save time and reduce costs, by providing greater visibility of key strategic and operational information. Council is now using OneBI to make more informed decisions, by accessing real-time information in an easily digestible format.
"We're saving about 700 hours a year across the organisation, by using OneBI," Mr Strachan said.
"That translates to a cost savings of about $700,000, and allows the branches to undertake other value-add activities. Rather than spending all their time trying to find the information, they can better utilise resources to provide an improved service to the public."
"The graphical overlay of OneBI really talks in everyone's language."
Robert Strachan, Finance Manager
Logan City Council's perspective
Logan City Council is a local government in South East Queensland, with a population of more than 300,000 residents across its land area of 957 square kilometres. The council was seeking a business intelligence system that could easily exploit information from its enterprise software.
Logan City Council uses a number of TechnologyOne products for its core business processes, including TechnologyOne Financials, Supply Chain, Human Resource & Payroll (HRP), Asset Management and Enterprise Budgeting. The council implemented OneBI to extract and deliver data from both TechnologyOne's software and third party systems in a simple, easy to understand format.
"The graphical overlay of OneBI really talks in everyone's language," Finance Manager Robert Strachan said.
"To interpret finance numbers you need a certain type of knowledge and expertise. But to have that information presented in a table, graph or dashboard really simplifies it, so it is easy to understand.
"OneBI provides live information, which means you aren't looking at data from last week, or last month. It gives you the option to look at historical data, or at the current period.
"From a managerial perspective, OneBI provides transparency. Managers can now see in real-time, what's happening, when and where across the city. It definitely improves decision making."
The council is now using OneBI to simplify reporting from its HRP and Financials systems, with plans to eventually roll out to Asset Management and external databases.
"The budget process this year has been about finding efficiencies and cost savings, and that's not going to change for the next few years," Mr Strachan said. "Working with OneBI is allowing us to make those improvements. We are certainly now producing quality work at a rapid rate."
Spotlight on preconfigured solutions
OneBI provided Logan City Council with a sophisticated set of predefined business intelligence dashboards. The council used the proven practice templates as a basis, from which it could tailor the dashboards to meet its specific requirements.
"We used the OneBI preconfigured templates as a starting point and built on that to deliver to the specific needs of our organisation," Mr Strachan said.
"It was a great idea to take on the templates, so we could get a feeling of what needed to be done. Without them, we would have been building from scratch.
"Half the battle is being able to visualise where to start. OneBI was brilliant, because it provided us with some guidance on what we could do with the system, and then left us to run with it.
"Now, there's no limitation to what we can do with the system."
Mr Strachan said the preconfigured approach significantly reduced implementation time, cost and risk.
"From prior experience with other business intelligence systems, I baulked at the thought of having to pay consultants to take an endless amount of time to get the system up and running.
"But the implementation was painless, and we've found that TechnologyOne's system is very simple to use. We're able to configure the solution in-house, which is much more sustainable and cost effective."
About Logan City Council
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