City of Victor Harbor makes single biggest change in its history

SOUTH AUSTRALIA, 26 JULY 2023 – Residents, visitors and council staff in the picturesque City of Victor Harbor will benefit from a decision by the council to upgrade its key corporate systems to a modern Australian-made, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform from TechnologyOne.

The new corporate system will allow council, which oversees 16,100 residents and 11,000 rateable properties, to operate more efficiently, make services more accessible to the community and create a foundation for future innovation.

It’s the single biggest investment council has ever undertaken in technology and our organisation, explains City of Victor Harbor’s Chief Executive Officer, Victoria MacKirdy.

“Our team has gone from using many different applications and software programs as part of their workflow to one that is configured to meet council’s needs. There is now a reliable, secure and stable single ‘source of truth’ for the management and reporting of council business” Ms MacKirdy said.

“Ultimately, the switch to TechnologyOne is all about delivering a better customer experience, delivering on our aspirations and provide a safe and secure platform for our residents and ratepayers, while providing our teams more time and resources to plan strategically for Victor Harbor’s future.

“It’s a really exciting opportunity for the organisation, as well as the greater community. For a long time, we have been focused on working within the limits of outdated corporate systems. Now we have a new foundation that is secure, stable and flexible. It will grow and adapt as council engages with important projects in the community,” Ms MacKirdy said.

Ms MacKirdy said during a strategic review of Council’s Community Plan 2030, the organisation identified that its core technology systems, some of which were up to 20 years old, were no longer fit for purpose.

“Council had a variety of on-premise software applications acquired over time. Individually, each of them were purposeful, but there was little integration. Gathering information was time-consuming for our teams,” she said.

Following the strategic review, the City of Victor Harbor endorsed the move to a single, integrated, online software solution. A thorough tender process was completed and TechnologyOne’s SaaS platform, OneCouncil, was selected in March 2022. The City of Victor Harbor is in good company with 73 percent of Australian and New Zealand residents living in a council powered by TechnologyOne.

Release 1 of council’s transition has involved adopting OneCouncil’s Financial and Expenditure Management, Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Asset Management, Spatial, Enterprise Content Management, Property and Rating – Request Management and HR & Payroll. These modules all went live on 1 July.

“The next phase of the project will see our community experiencing significant direct benefits, including the introduction of a new customer request portal that will allow interaction with council services online at a time that suits them, not just between 9am and 5pm,” Ms MacKirdy said.

“We will be streamlining processes for community members to book council-owned facilities like the local recreation centre, meeting rooms or public reserves. Some application forms will be simplified from 26 pages to just three and processing times reduced to minutes rather than hours,” Ms MacKirdy said.

In the summer months, demand on council services continues to grow as thousands of holidaymakers make the one-hour journey from Adelaide to enjoy Victor Harbor’s natural beauty and relaxed coastal lifestyle.

That seasonal influx is one of many reasons council needs a sophisticated approach to asset management that takes into account many of its facilities – from roads and car parks to playgrounds and picnic areas.

“We saw great benefit of including OneCouncil’s Spatial module in Release 1 of the project,” said Ms MacKirdy. “The City of Victor Harbor is the first Council in Australia to take advantage of Spatial as part of TechnologyOne’s Ci Anywhere solution.”

Ed Chung, Chief Executive Officer of TechnologyOne, said “We’ve helped hundreds of councils make the move to SaaS, and we are always proud to see the outcomes – more time to deliver for residents, more money saved and more opportunities for the future of their community.”

“One of the most often overlooked benefits of a natively integrated SaaS platform such as ours is that the more you use it the more you get out of it. It’s a virtuous cycle,” he said.