Streamlined business processing with 'while you wait' claims processing.
Cornwall Council is improving customer service to revenues and benefits claimants across the county with a £170,000 EDM and Workflow platform from Civica. The company, which is a market leader in specialist systems and business process services that help organisations to achieve a more cost-efficient way of working, started the system implementation on June 1. Completion is scheduled for December this year.
Using Civica’s software, the income & assessment teams in Cornwall’s Shared Services will speed up revenues and benefits processing with one single platform for scanning and administration of the 3,000 documents and communications they receive every day. Cornwall – which is one of the largest unitary councils in the country – collects £250 million in council tax, £146 million in business rates and pays out over £212 million in benefits annually.
The new system's workflow capabilities will automatically allocate casework to staff, reduce business processing times and improve management of overall workloads.
In addition, Civica EDM and Workflow enables barcoding of documents, simplifying records management for the estimated 800,000 items held on the revenues and benefits database.
The new Civica EDM and Workflow implementation continues the authority’s consolidation of operations. Cornwall’s revenues and benefits processing will be administered from three main centres from November this year while the new system will provide improved performance for ‘while you wait’ benefits processing from local offices in the future.
In addition, revenues and benefits staff will have flexible options such as home working in the future, because the Civica platform will integrate with all offices’ ICT systems.
Claire Johnston, project manager, Shared Services, Cornwall Council, commented:
“To cut processing times for our customers, we need a single scanning and administration platform. Civica fitted the bill with faster business processes and better integration into our revenues and benefits system. We’re particularly pleased that our service teams will be able to do their own development work on the software modules to further customise our services to customers.”
Bill Loughrey, managing director, local government, at Civica, commented: “Our market leading EDM & Workflow system will help Cornwall’s Shared Services to continue to bring down revenues and benefits processing costs while offering a better, faster service at local offices that are spread out across a very large geographical area. In addition, the platform is scalable across all of Cornwall’s operations so the authority could streamline business processes in other departments in the future as local needs dictate.”