Delivering Next Level Digital Transformation

A large part of the department’s responsibilities revolves around permits and licensing. 

Supported by senior management, the department recognized that their current systems and processes were not fit for purpose. Largely manual or run using legacy systems, application processes covered hundreds of different permit activities and thousands of different permutations across multiple siloed divisions. This caused time delays, inaccuracies and lack of traceability. And with each license typically having individual specific conditions, and complex ones taking years for the approval process and involving multiple stakeholders, the situation was becoming untenable. 

The department decided to embark on a digital transformation initiative to build an online environment for customer and partner engagement. 

The project provides functionality not only for staff in the office but via a mobile application with offline capability for those in the field and in remote locations. The transformation program also features integration with financial systems. In further enhancements, Roboyo has recently provided a new user interface for external customers to deliver an improved customer experience. 

The department accrued over $70m in user charges and fees.  

The Roboyo solution digitized the assessment of permit applications, automated compliance checks and data validation, automated the process workflow, automated the approval of standard applications for customers, integrated multiple external services including data validation and look-up services, provided a payment gateway integrated with existing financial systems and provided automated reconciliation processes, and leveraged the opportunity to consolidate additional core systems into a department-wide platform for increased intelligence and decreased operational costs. 

The department has benefited immensely from the program, both initially and on an ongoing basis.  

Through Roboyo’s implementation, on-time and within budget, the department was named a winner in the Process Excellence (PEX) Awards. The PEX Awards are globally recognized, annual awards which honor and celebrate process excellence and service delivery teams who have exceeded industry standards. At the time, the award-winning program was one of the fastest application deployments in the world.  

More significantly from the department’s perspective, licenses are now issued in some cases in seconds rather than days, and data accuracy has been improved so that reporting and auditing is rigorous and reliable. Workflow automation has resulted in greatly improved productivity via streamlined business processes. With over 900 users on the system, that adds up to considerable budget savings, as well as improved employee satisfaction. 

Customer experience has improved dramatically for the 27,000 external stakeholders who use the system, through self-service processes, automated approvals and detailed and timely communication. 

The department’s digital and business transformation program has proved that ongoing results are delivered successfully from incremental change – from evolution rather than revolution – or, as the Boston Consulting Group might say, “they’re cost effective, incremental, and sustainable.”