Hertfordshire Building Control
Mobile working leads to productivity boost

Challenge:

Delivering value and efficiency to seven local authorities

Hertfordshire Building Control are a non-profit organisation providing statutory building control approval services to the following authorities in their local area:

• Broxbourne Borough Council
• North Hertfordshire District Council
• Stevenage Borough Council
• Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council
• East Herts District Council
• Hertsmere Borough Council
• Three Rivers District Council

Their aim is to work in collaboration with builders, architects and agents to ensure that every building project achieves approval with the minimum of disruption. With seven authorities to provide proactive advice and support to, Hertfordshire Building Control needed the most effective, solution-led approach in order to add value to their clients and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, delays and costs. 

Solution:

Adoption of a fully mobile solution to streamline processes

Hertfordshire Building Control adopted Idox Cloud in 2017 that has since been instrumental in contributing to the growth and evolution of their Building Control processes. The mobile solution provided an online customer portal to submit, pay for and track all applications. This assisted Hertfordshire Building Control in their goal of going paperless. This digital transformation ultimately empowered them to streamline processes and reduce costs with modern, fully integrated, cloud-based software solutions. 

 “It evolves with you as your needs require it. It’s important to understand that it’s not the system that’s important, it’s the output that it enables. Such things like mobile working. “

Simon Heywood, Managing Director of Hertfordshire Building Control

Outcome:

Significant productivity gains and time savings

During this time, Hertfordshire Building Control has experienced significant productivity gains through the adoption of agile working practices. As a natively mobile solution with no local installation, they did not require any mobile working extensions or third-party licenses, and instead could access 100% of the system’s functions through any modern device with mobile internet as standard. No limitations on system functionality meant that the physical location of the user was no longer a barrier for productivity and officers had full access to real-time data while in the field; therefore, enabling agile working. Further, an internet-enabled device has allowed for significant savings in terms of administration time, paper, travel time and travel expenses. Furthermore, the increase in accuracy and access to data, brings an enhanced service to citizens and businesses, and in turn a higher level of customer satisfaction, as officers can be even more proactive in managing their workload.