Brisbane City Council: Delivering City Services in Hours Instead of Days with SAP ERP

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1 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Picture Credit Brisbane City Council, Brisbane, Australia. Used with permission. Brisbane City Council: Delivering City Services in Hours Instead of Days with SAP ERP As part of the SAP Future Cities program, the city council of Brisbane, Australia, implemented the SAP ERP application to integrate and unify its departments and make employees more productive. City residents benefit especially from GEO.e, mobile device software built on SAP ERP that allows field staff to accomplish far more on asset-maintenance visits.

2 Organization Brisbane City Council Location Brisbane, Australia Industry Public sector Products and Services Municipal services Employees 7,400 Web Site Partners Accenture Service & Support organization from SAP Business Transformation Objectives Better serve the people of Brisbane Improve efficiency for all employees, especially field service personnel Become one council with a common platform Adopted the SAP ERP application Implemented GEO.e (geographical enablement) software for linking mapping and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data Provided GEO.e data to the field staff as a front end for their mobile devices Benefits More time for field service personnel to spend actually delivering services Better, more timely asset management Improved communication and relationships among employees Read more Top Benefits Achieved 5% Field staff time spent on data entry, down from 20% 5% to 10% Field staff productivity increase <8 years Payback on SAP software investment Our SAP software is fundamentally changing the way the council operates. Finally we re an integrated business. Greg Evans, Divisional Manager Organizational Services, Brisbane City Council 2 / 6

3 Unifying and mobilizing a staff of 7,400 Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, has Australia s biggest city council, with 7,400 employees managing assets worth $A2.1 billion (US$1.5 billion). The council delivers a wide range of municipal services to the city s population of nearly 3 million people. The council has developed a strategy it calls Smart City that calls for using technology to better serve the people of Brisbane. Recently, using Smart City principles, council members examined the business practices in place and found considerable room for improvement. They wanted to provide electronic communication among departments not just to expedite processes but to help create a more unified overall organization One council, in the words of Greg Evans, divisional manager for organizational services. Whether it s our asset management guys, our finance people, or our customer service operators, we wanted everyone to be on the same page and operating from a single platform, he says. We knew that was the key to becoming a truly integrated council, which steered us to an evaluation of ERP systems. One group that stood to benefit particularly from integration was the Field Services Group, which maintains the city s roads, parks, sewer systems, and other assets. Requests for work on assets were taking too long because technicians would first have to locate the site on a map, then travel to it, assess the situation, return to the office, transcribe their observations, look up information about the asset, determine a course of action, and eventually send out a delivery team to do the actual work. The whole process could easily take several days or more, says Mica Julien, executive manager for the Field Services Group. We knew there had to be a better way. 3 / 6

4 Making smartphones smarter Since integration was the council s foremost goal, it had little difficulty identifying the right solution for its needs: SAP ERP. What is very powerful about SAP software is the integrated nature of it, says Evans. We only need to capture a piece of information once, for example, even though it might be used to automatically populate our payroll data, our financial data, our asset data, and so forth in any combination. The standard functionality of SAP ERP served Brisbane well for finance, procurement, payroll, planning, and asset and works management; and solutions from SuccessFactors, an SAP company, provided all the required human capital management functionality. But for field service needs, the council wanted more. It engaged the Service & Support organization along with Accenture to implement an application called GEO.e to go the next step by serving as a front end for field staff members mobile devices. Brisbane s application, which is modeled after other successful deployments of GEO.e, is built upon the plant maintenance functionality of SAP ERP and mapping applications from Esri. Now, instead of the time-consuming back and forth of the past to deliver a city service, a technician with a GEO.e-equipped mobile device goes to and examines a work site, takes pictures, ties that information to an asset that is clearly marked on a map, and looks up all the historical information about that asset stored in SAP ERP. He or she decides then and there what needs to be done and sends all the necessary information to an operational team. This team then mobilizes with all equipment required and is dispatched to do the work. Jobs that used to take days can be done in hours or less. 4 / 6

5 Proving its worth within weeks The power of GEO.e was proven within weeks of going live when a massive hailstorm hit Brisbane, felling trees and damaging assets of all kinds. With real-time situational awareness, Brisbane s emergency services personnel could see requests for help popping up constantly on maps. GEO.e was enormously valuable in prioritizing, planning, and managing needs and getting the city back on its feet quickly. Users of all kinds enjoy their new solution, especially and surprisingly to some the field staff. Many of our field staff have had very little exposure to technologybased applications; however, they have picked up the new system and just love it. It enables them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently without the burden of endless paperwork, says Evans. Recording and costing time sheets accurately has become a breeze with the assistance the system provides. It s so intuitive that it links an employee to the job they have been allocated to. Besides time spent, field staff use their mobile devices to record sick leave and health and safety incidents, which are addressed much sooner than before because the information is transmitted to management electronically rather than on paper. The SAP software is helping the council achieve compliance with government regulations more easily than ever. For segregation of duties, for example, it provides better records of what people have done and helps assure that suppliers are paid once and only once and that payroll controls are strictly enforced. Auditors receive information that is not only better but delivered in minutes or hours, not days. 5 / 6

6 Brisbane City Council Getting even more benefit from mobile solutions on the job Studio SAP (15/08) 2014 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Soon field staff members will be taking even better advantage of their mobile job solutions. The council tried in the past to save time by having people go directly to a job site from their homes in the morning rather than to a central depot to meet with their team leader. It did not work out, because too often people did not know exactly what to do when they arrived at a site or were ill equipped. Now, with all the necessary information available on their mobile devices, the council is optimistic that the next attempt will succeed. The council is also considering equipping residents of Brisbane, when they see a need for maintenance, to log it, geocode it, and send in a picture with accompanying text. The field staff would then be able to view all this information using GEO.e and quickly provide the remedy. This has the potential to save enormous time compared with the normal contact center process and to enable the council to deliver even better quality of life to the people of Brisbane. 6 / 6 Picture Credit Brisbane City Council, Brisbane, Australia. Used with permission.

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