Cheltenham Borough Council
Large-scale digital transformation that delivers real results

Challenge:

Revolutionising key processes to work more efficiently and drive savings

With siloed legacy systems and costly overheads in place, a digital transformation initiative was needed to keep pace during a time of changing technology and reduced budgets. The aim for Cheltenham Borough Council was to coordinate disjointed workflows and transition to a central, end-to-end digital platform – one capable of improving experiences for both staff and citizens and encompassing services across the authority. How could they transition to a new way of working while maintaining business as usual and attempting to realise additional savings?

Solution:

Empowering staff and citizens by facilitating a 100% channel shift

The Council implemented Idox’s case management solution, Uniform. This functioned as a central data hub for several core service areas including Planning, Building Control, Environmental Health, Licensing, Estates Management and Land Charges. Building on this solid infrastructure and supported by our suite of online forms, the Council moved 100% of its taxi and private hire licensing function onto the new digital platform, allowing citizens to apply for new licences at their convenience, while granting licence holders the ability to renew their licence online at any time.

Sanjay Mistry, Programme Manager for Cheltenham Borough Council said: “Our services were powered by a legacy approach and they were all disjointed – it wasn’t ideal or cost effective. We were looking for a single platform that allowed us to rationalise and unify our technologies, that reduced our overheads and that avoided the need to purchase additional hardware. The Idox solution offers something for all our services – it gives us alignment between departments and fewer overheads – less servers, less maintenance, less support required from our ICT services divisions, which has been a real benefit for us internally.”

Outcome:

Reduced overheads and enhanced service delivery

The project outcomes are far exceeding the original forecasts with:

• Overall savings of £93k in less than a year
• 100% channel shift for the Council’s taxi and private hire licensing function
• £40k and £15k saved on consolidating legacy systems and reducing paperwork, respectively
• Commercial activity increased by £4-5k
• 156 public facing hours saved
• End-to-end online customer journey times improved by 71%

Louis Krog, Licensing Manager at the Council adds “The forms have eliminated a huge amount of officer time that would have typically been spent processing and filing pieces of paper manually – it’s all automated now. Our officers can get on with the job of determining the applications rather than having to do the administration before getting to their day job. For citizens, they can do their applications and renewals anytime, from anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection – they can do it on their smartphone, their computer, laptop or their tablet. Idox’s back office software is also there to support the whole process – its robust, it works, it does what we need it to do and it’s scalable.”

Looking to the future, Cheltenham is focused on large-scale transformation. The team are looking to enhance their digital technology, rolling out our tablet applications to enable staff to work on the move and drive productivity. As Sanjay notes: “We want to empower our officers to do more work in the field. These are evolving aspirations for us and that’s how we want to move forward for the next phase.”