Queensland’s Hinchinbrook Shire Council has become the first local government in Australia to benefit from the new digital transformation initiative, CiA Live, from TechnologyOne.
The Council says it has saved significant time and effort on its digital transformation by using CiA Live, to help move its back-office I.T. to a new software-as-as-service platform.
The council serves a regional North Queensland community of nearly 12,000 people, centred on the town of Ingham, covering 2,810 square kilometres from Hinchinbrook Island on the coast and inland to Mount Fox. It has more than 6,500 rateable properties.
The Council wanted to move to SaaS to become more efficient, save more money and bring about broader business transformation. However, it was concerned implementing a new and improved tech system would cost time and money.
“Pretty much anything you might want to do, TechnologyOne has already done with another council,” said Council Director Corporate and Community Services, Brett Exelby.
“It just makes commercial sense for us to leverage that industry knowledge.”
Council opted to upgrade to TechnologyOne’s newest platform, CiA – like other Councils across the state – but in doing so became the first to benefit from TechnologyOne’s new CiA Live service, created with the company’s extensive knowledge and experience of the hundreds of such migrations.
CiA Live leverages Migration Central, a simple and efficient solution to upgrade an organisation’s business processes from TechnologyOne’s Ci platform to the fourth-generation ERP platform, CiA. The purpose-built tool was designed to support and enable an organisation to self-navigate through a guided set of migration steps.
“As a small, resource-constrained council, that made a lot of sense to us,” said Council Information Services Manager, Steven Veltmeyer.
TechnologyOne also provided the Council with a dedicated team to help guide it through the transition.
“CiA Live helped make the decision to move to SaaS easier for us by helping to make the process more efficient on our side. The step-by-step approach meant we learned from the experience of others,” Mr Veltmeyer said.
Having completed the transition from Ci to CiA, Council says it is looking forward to the difference.
“TechnologyOne’s CiA platform is what we use to interact with customers, do rates notices, finance, all asset management and payroll, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s sort of the heartbeat of what the Council does,” says Mr Veltmeyer.
“The beauty of CiA is you can use it anywhere. You can use it in any browser: our people can go out and use their field app or use it on their phones. We’re really looking forward to seeing everything our people are able do with it.”
Hinchinbrook Shire Director Corporate and Community Services, Brett Exelby added: “Migrating to CiA shows our staff that we’re serious about investing in bringing the organisation forward.”
“It also allows us as a management team to focus on our mission, not managing IT infrastructure. When you’re running your own IT systems, you wear the risk if something goes wrong. Moving to SaaS means you’re instead buying a service.”
The next step for the Council will be to add TechnologyOne’s Asset Management module to its complement of OneCouncil modules later this year.
TechnologyOne Chief Executive Officer, Ed Chung, said Hinchinbrook was a great illustration of the reason CiA Live was developed.
“CiA Live is a fantastic tool in that it helps reduce the barriers that might prevent smaller organisations from migrating to a modern SaaS platform. It also demonstrates a few of TechnologyOne’s strengths as a customer focussed organisation too,” Mr Chung said.
“We know large scale ERP implementations are complex, so we set out to create solutions to simplify it for customers. CiA Live allows them to tap into the deep and broad experience we have in helping 1,000 others make the transition to SaaS. And it demonstrates the investment we place on R&D,” he said.
