TechnologyOne runs for council

TechnologyOne’s Financials platform has enabled New Zealand’s Far North District Council to thrive during a demanding period of growth...

The Far North District Council (FNDC) is New Zealand’s northern-most local government administrative district and home to one of the country’s tourist icons, the Cape Reinga lighthouse. FNDC staff are located in towns across the region that are up to two hours travel time apart.

Administering this area is the responsibility of 250 enthusiastic individuals who are consistently looking for ways to improve the way they do business and provide greater returns to rate payers. It was this desire for productivity improvement that led FNDC general manager finance and business, Ian Sivyer, to adopt TechnologyOne’s financial package in 2005.

“The previous system had proven cumbersome in terms of reporting and was difficult to change,” says Sivyer.

“While it was an integrated system the reporting was fixed and it was difficult for us to change focus or to use it as a building block for a much broader range of solutions as we can with the TechnologyOne platform.” Janice Smith joined the FNDC as finance manager just as TechnologyOne Financials was going live.

She says she’s found TechnologyOne Financials to be the best system she has worked with. Both Smith and Sivyer say a key strength of the system is its reporting, which makes it easy to extract information in a variety of formats suiting the needs of the various stakeholders within the council.

Timely upgrade
Since launch, the TechnologyOne Financials platform has become a vital component of the FNDC’s infrastructure: it is used by the full finance team and key managers across all 12 offices – a total of 50 staff with direct access to the system.

In August 2007, FNDC upgraded from version 10.2 to 11.3 and included a number of new modules in the process with Business Intelligence being added in November.

Having scoped the council’s requirements with Sivyer, the upgrade itself was managed by an analyst within the FNDC Finance Team. She worked with TechnologyOne, and they jointly spent an hour a day with key FNDC staff members over a two week period to understand their requirements. The analyst was then able to seamlessly implement the upgrade.

“We didn’t need a specialist team or someone with a specialist Business Intelligence skill set,” says Ian. “Our analyst was able to do it herself with TechnologyOne supporting her from its Auckland office and with access to developers in Australia. In fact after three years of using TechnologyOne we have had no ‘critical issues’ and any minor glitches have been fixed within a day.”

Both Smith and Sivyer report the TechnologyOne platform has enabled dramatic improvements in both productivity and customer service. The system enables electronic approval and tracking of all invoices – which are now scanned and stored electronically.

This has removed the need for couriering documents between offices and significantly improved the response time for both payments and customer enquiries.

The Purchase Order module also provided some very real savings. “(It) enables the tracing of the real costs in real time,” explains Smith. “You can lock down what your commitments are and can cost out with more detail than we did before; it is immediate and gives far greater visibility.”

The financial reporting tool was a key driver when FNDC originally decided to partner with TechnologyOne and Sivyer says the flexibility of the reporting tool has proven invaluable.

“Last year’s council election saw a number of new councillors come on board with a strong business focus,” he says.

“What they were looking for in reporting was quite different to what the previous council had requested, the team was able to respond with a completely different range of reports from TechnologyOne Financials completing the switch over in weeks. Everyone commented if we hadn’t had this sort of software it would have been a huge problem for us.”

FNDC also added multi ledger and multi reporting modules, Business Intelligence and a Works and Asset tool which is used for fleet management and capital project monitoring.

Big gain in Business Intelligence
The big gain from the Business Intelligence (BI) module was the further flexibility it gave for providing managers with the reporting they asked for.

Smith says managers who were self-confessed “financial-phobes” went from being completely bamboozled by numbers on bits of paper to fully understanding the information they were required to not only digest but act upon.

“The financial team gets everyone’s reports, individual managers get their own and the Council and the senior management team all receive the core report covering income, expenditure and capital. The flexibility of the TechnologyOne BI system enables this to be significantly customised. Of the eight general managers five have chosen to further define the information they receive,” she says.

Effortless integration
Integrating with existing systems is always a major consideration in any upgrade. It was critical for FNDC to integrate with Pathway, a property and regulatory management system for councils, and with ComacccPayroll for managing the council’s payroll operations.

TechnologyOne had an existing link to Pathway through working with Australian local government but FNDC was the first in New Zealand to install it.

“Since we trialled it here so successfully, other councils have done the same – or are looking to do so”, says Sivyer. TechnologyOne also integrates well with Comacc.

The success FNDC has experienced with TechnologyOne’s products has seen other New Zealand councils looking at what FNDC is doing, and how they too can benefit from adopting similar systems.

Sivyer says that FNDC’s close relationship with TechnologyOne, has allowed the FNDC to actively engage with TechnologyOne’s development team in Australia to provide input into how various modules might be further enhanced.

He says that TechnologyOne’s Financials has provided an excellent platform for providing flexibility and productivity through a wide range of business processes through additional add-on modules.

“The advice I would give to other councils”, he says, “is to think outside the box. This is not just about numbers but business processes and a much broader, wider tool. TechnologyOne is not just an account package with reports but a really powerful business management tool that is easy to use.”

Sivyer and Smith are also using TechnologyOne’s planning tools to develop a ten year planning strategy for the Far North District Council. In April 2008, FNDC reviewed its planning tools and processes and switched to the Enterprise Budgeting solution as a result. While the existing system had allowed good forward planning it required some “outside” intervention to perform some of the more complex calculations and provide an interactive solution to council deliberations.

“Because we are able to exchange live data with plan data, we can develop “scenario” models that are a lot more accurate,” explains Sivyer. Smith also attributes the delivery of overall better financial management and the ability to control funds to TechnologyOne.

“We are able to generate more investment interest and run less of an overdraft. Our planning is dramatically improved with monthly financial reporting having gone from a 19-day to a five-day reporting format.”

In summary, Sivyer reports that most of the Councils he talks to are amazed at what FNDC has been able to achieve with TechnologyOne. FNDC has grown considerably in size over the past three years.

Through implementing TechnologyOne FNDC has been able to increase productivity without requiring additional resources and can now deliver an unprecedented level of reporting, financial management and service to its many and various stakeholders.

For more information

TechnologyOne
www.TechnologyOneCorp.com
+61 2 9460 1000
Sales@TechnologyOneCorp.com

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