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Tayside Contracts
Challenge
Tayside Contracts is a multi-disciplined contracting organization with over 2,800 employees delivering contracting services throughout Tayside and other parts of Scotland. The company focuses on the local government sector, being owned by three councils: Dundee City, Angus and Perth & Kinross. Its service areas include catering, cleaning, highway maintenance and vehicle maintenance.
Tayside Contracts’ problem was in handling the vast amounts of correspondence that arrives every week. Each enquiry received relates to a different service area and the existing, manual system for dealing with this correspondence was struggling to cope. The process was incredibly complicated; firstly, all correspondence addressed to head office had to be sorted into specific activity areas, then it was delivered back to the main sorting office and finally delivered to the correct department. All this had to happen before the request could even start to be dealt with. The problem was further exacerbated by the fact that the Tayside Contracts offices are geographically dispersed across Tayside. Furthermore, if an enquiry related to more than one department, the paper letter had to be photocopied and re-routed to all of the relevant offices, again in a variety of locations across Tayside. Not only was this process a drain on resources it was also incredibly time-consuming. A simple request could take weeks to reach its conclusion. Using the manual process, Tayside Contracts found it very difficult to provide the fast response to these requests. The company identified a need for a solution that would drastically streamline this process, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.
Solution
As Head of IST at Tayside Contracts, Norman Kelso felt that: “We required a solution which was capable of sorting, filing and distributing incoming correspondence. Our ideal solution was an online system where employees could track requests automatically in order for us to maintain a high level of customer and citizen satisfaction. Our manual process of sorting the correspondence was simply too time consuming, and requests were not being dealt with in the time frames that we were aspiring to achieve”.
Consultants who were working with Tayside Contracts to tackle its process issues, recommended Metastorm’s Business Process Management (BPM) solution as the ideal tool to enable the Tayside Contracts departments and offices across Tayside to work in a more effective and efficient manner.
Results
The subsequent implementation program took just three months to complete, including a full training program for Tayside Contracts employees on how to use their new system.
Having the Metastorm solution in place meant that requests were automatically logged and routed. The old paper based processes were now replaced entirely by an online electronic filing system. Now an enquiry can be routed between offices at the press of a button, and its progress monitored from the main sorting office. Both contact centre and frontline staff are able to view the current status and a detailed history of each request, promoting internal accountability and ownership.
Tayside Contracts were so pleased with the success of the correspondence project that they decided to implement Metastorm BPM as a tool to process electronic ‘Holiday Request’ forms. In the past, holiday forms were filled in manually and passed between managers for authorization. Then the managers would forward the request to HR and payroll - again this process could take days to complete. Using Metastorm BPM technology all holiday requests are completed online in minutes. Automatic alerts are sent to managers to bring a request to their immediate attention.
Following the success of the initial project, Tayside Contracts has also used Metastorm technology to create an IT service desk, allowing them to track consumables within the organization. The IT inventory is held on the system allowing employees to report, identify and fix faults in record time.
A delighted Norman Kelso commented, “Moving forward, we are now looking to implement Metastorm technology to further improve our business processes in a number of areas which cover cross department functionality, and following the success of the incoming correspondence we are now keen to develop a similar system for all outgoing correspondence.” He continued, “The Metastorm solution has drastically reduced administration time for our employees, and has helped us reduce both costs on mail and time on other internal processes.”
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