Integrated data enterprise solution for Australian Council
Adopting a complete customer-centric approach as part of an organisational objective, the Livingstone Shire Council, nestled approximately 650km north of Brisbane along the beautiful Capricorn Coast of Australia’s Queensland, is simplifying the way consumers are engaging with public utility services.
This feature article was originally published in The Global Power & Energy Elites 2022
The Council serving nearly 40,000 residents across 11,776km2 offers the standard regional services, including water and wastewater services as well as hard waste, parks, jobs, pets, parking and roads.
With these services, there were a number of disparate IT systems with no single source of truth and no single customer reference. The customer was expected to interact with a number of separate council departments for individual issues often being passed between multiple staff members.
Customer-centricity
In 2019, the Council decided it wanted to change that and to increase its customer-centric service approach started a process to identify and procure a relevant system. At the time the Council accepted that it needed to think bigger than the traditional local government space and offerings.
The decision was taken to implement SMAaRT Council Oracle as an integrated business solution that places the customer as the focus with a better experience through operational efficiency and agility across all its service areas.
A large body of work mapping all systems and workflows became the basis of its requirements for approaching the open market, with the outcome that the SMAaRT Council Oracle product was identified in partnership with project management company allaboutXpert as most closely aligned to its vision.
The AUS$12 million (US$9 million) transformation project, referred to as Project Merlin, has deployed the Oracle Customer to Meter solution, while the Work and Asset Cloud Services has equipped the Council with shared data via an integrated business solution for common functions such as rate management, billing and collections, land registration, work and asset management and capital works.
“As a small council without the same resources as larger bodies, we realised we could achieve greater value and economies of scale by utilising one enterprise asset management solution across all service areas,” says Matthew Willcocks, Chief Technology Officer at Livingstone Shire Council.
“For departments with similar work processes, one true single and central view of assets, data and metrics brings greater insights to predictive maintenance, and provides enormous benefit for greater overall efficiencies and operational cost savings.”
Read the full project feature here
