Queensland’s Hinchinbrook Shire Council first to benefit from TechnologyOne’s new digital transformation tool

Hinchinbrook Shire Council wanted to move to TechnologyOne’s fourth generation Software as a Service (SaaS) ERP solution, CiA, to help become more efficient, save more money and bring about broader business transformation. But the council was concerned implementing a new and improved tech system would cost time and money.

The council serves a regional North Queensland community of nearly 12,000 people, centred on the town of Ingham, covering 2,810 square kilometres from Hinchinbrook Island on the coast and inland to Mount Fox. It has more than 6,500 rateable properties. But as a small council, Hinchinbrook has faced financial constraints and budget challenges.

A TechnologyOne customer since 2012, the team had seen the benefits of the Australian-owned software company’s 36 years of experience working with other local governments. Late last year it sought the company’s advice.

“Pretty much anything you might want to do, TechnologyOne has already done with another council,” said Brett Exelby, Director Corporate and Community Services, “It just makes commercial sense for us to leverage that industry knowledge.”

Hinchinbrook opted to follow in the footsteps of its fellow councils that upgraded to TechnologyOne’s newest platform, CiA. But it became the first to benefit from TechnologyOne’s new CiA Live service, created with the company’s extensive knowledge and experience of the hundreds of such migrations its completed.

CiA Live leverages Migration Central, a simple and efficient solution to upgrade an organisation’s business processes from TechnologyOne’s Ci platform to the fourth-generation ERP platform, CiA. The purpose-built tool was designed to support and enable an organisation to self-navigate through a guided set of migration steps.

“As a small, resource-constrained council, that made a lot of sense to us,” Steven Veltmeyer, Information Services Manager, Hinchinbrook Shire Council.

TechnologyOne also provided the council with a dedicated team to help it through the transition.

“CiA Live helped make the decision to move to SaaS easier for us by helping to make the process more efficient on our side. The step-by-step approach meant we learned from the experience of others,” Mr Veltmeyer said.

Having completed the transition from Ci to CiA, Hinchinbrook is looking forward to the difference.

“TechnologyOne’s CiA platform is what we use to interact with customers, do rates notices, finance, all asset management and payroll, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s sort of the heartbeat of what the Council does,” says Mr Veltmeyer.

“The beauty of CiA is you can use it anywhere. You can use it in any browser: our people can go out and use their field app or use it on their phones. We’re really looking forward to seeing everything our people are able do with it.”

Hinchinbrook Shire Director Corporate and Community Services Brett Exelby added: “Migrating to CiA shows our staff that we’re serious about investing in bringing the organisation forward.”

“It also allows us as a management team to focus on our mission, not managing IT infrastructure. When you’re running your own IT systems, you wear the risk if something goes wrong. Moving to SaaS means you’re instead buying a service.”

The next step for Hinchinbrook will be to add TechnologyOne’s Asset Management module to its complement of OneCouncil modules later this year.

TechnologyOne Chief Executive Officer, Ed Chung, said Hinchinbrook was a great illustration of the reason CiA Live was developed.

“CiA Live is a fantastic tool in that it helps reduce the barriers that might prevent smaller organisations from migrating to a modern SaaS platform. It also demonstrates a few of TechnologyOne’s strengths as a customer focussed organisation too,” Mr Chung said.

“We know large scale ERP implementations are complex, so we set out to create solutions to simplify it for customers. CiA Live allows them to tap into the deep and broad experience we have in helping 1,000 others make the transition to SaaS. And it demonstrates the investment we place on R&D,” he said.