Customer Story

The Organisation

Glenelg Shire Council is an Australian council situated between Adelaide and Melbourne that serves a community of 20,000+ people.

We spoke to Jemma Dillon, Business Analyst at Glenelg, who was happy to share how Flowingly has empowered frontline teams to deliver better and faster customer and employee experiences through no-code business process automation.

The Challenge

The Glenelg team ran a customer-needs analysis project to understand how they could better serve the needs of both their employees and their constituents.

Their analysis determined there was a mixed level of digital adoption across the Shire’s population, but an almost unanimous desire for improved efficiency and experiences when engaging with council services.

This helped inform their process improvement journey, making it clear that they needed to tackle the efficiency of their public-facing processes.

While they had rough documentation of these processes in place across Word and Visio, the processes themselves still relied on email and shared inboxes.

Transforming these processes from paper, PDF and email to consumer-grade digital experiences became the goal.

Being a slightly smaller council, they knew what they wanted to achieve was ambitious, so finding a tool that could create beautiful digital experiences but didn’t require deep pockets or developers was the key. They had a lot of legacy tools and processes in different systems which were creating bottlenecks for their teams and customers.

They also knew that they wanted to be able to report on the impact of their process improvement efforts but had no way of knowing how long a request took them to process (which was a problem in itself). As part of their reporting, they got teams within the organisation to self-report how long manual processes were taking so they could report back on how effective their automation efforts are and measure the time being saved.

The Solution

The Glenelg team identified a few different solutions that could help solve their process problems but they had a few key requirements in a solution, which were: 

• The software needed to be driven by business teams, not just sit with IT
• The tool would need to have a strong focus on increasing efficiency and task visibility
• The solution needed to be aligned with their ambitions for delivering world-class digital experiences for their community

Their ambitions perfectly matched both the product features and mission of Flowingly – with the Glenelg team needing an agile, easy-to-use tool that could help them scale their process mapping and workflow automation efforts rapidly.

“Automation for us is like live process mapping. We’re changing what we do in real-time, rather than creating some aspirational idea of what we should be doing.”

The no-code, frontline-led nature of the software was also a crucial aspect of their decision to go with Flowingly, especially as a smaller team. Having the ability to make updates in real-time was hugely beneficial, rather than relying on external parties or developers.

When Glenelg initially approached Flowingly, they had a specific plan in mind for their software rollout. They planned to build and push live automated workflows in 3-month phases to help build and maintain momentum within the organisation.

The Results

Since launch, the project has been extremely successful and early reports have shown outstanding time savings, with “early adopters seeing 60-70 minutes saved on every process run and they love it.”

Having Flowingly has especially been helpful for their frontline staff, bringing them and the back-office teams together. Process improvements have become more easily achievable, with employees feeling empowered to challenge the way they work for the better.

“One of the eye-openers has been being able to make changes on the fly. We’ll be sitting in a meeting and say ‘let’s make that change right now’ and we’ll then go make it on the fly in front of everyone. There are no drawn-out briefs, no communication breakdowns, we get agreement then and there.”

Now, staff are coming forward with all sorts of processes to automate, with Jemma saying “we haven’t had to look for processes to automate. People are coming to us with them.”

Right from the start, Glenelg wanted to track the time they were saving with Flowingly. By understanding their current state and measuring just how much time was being spent on admin, they have been able to quickly see the real impact it’s having on the business.

In the first 7 months post-go-live, they have pushed live an average of nearly 1 new automated process per week, and are now saving 7 weeks of admin per month. Extrapolated across the year, this will save them 34 weeks (based on a 40-hour week) of admin.

One single process (Kerbside Waste & Recycling Request) was taking their team 430 hours a year. This process now takes 61 hours, which adds up to over 9 weeks of a full-time job saved on a single process.

With 15 freshly automated processes rolling out every 3 months, the Glenelg team are expecting to free up over 200 admin weeks every year that will allow their teams to focus instead on quality work.

Beyond the time saved, the real success of the project has been the establishment of a true culture of continuous improvement. It was an ambitious project, but one that Jemma believes has more than paid off.

Making the shortlist for the MAV Tech Awards was just the icing on the cake, “we’re really satisfied, both in terms of justifying the idea itself and the execution of that idea.”