How Tauranga City Council saw more process adoption in four weeks with Flowingly than their previous tool achieved in a year
Tauranga City Council replaced Promapp with Flowingly – and within weeks, staff were mapping processes on their own with little to no training.
to surpass a year of previous adoption
of processes migrated successfully
phase rollout of mapping and automation
processes migrated from Promapp to Flowingly
Organisation
Tauranga City Council
Industry
Local Government
Region
Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
Products Used
Process Mapping →
“People are already using it more than what people were using the old system in over a year.”
“I was expecting something to go wrong, but all our maps were in, all our users were set up, and all the data was there and validated before it was handed over to us.”
The Organisation
Tauranga City Council is one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing local authorities, serving the Bay of Plenty region. The council’s Information Management team, led by Donna Officer, is responsible for the tools and systems staff use to document and manage how work gets done across the organisation.
We spoke with Donna and Senior Business Analyst Lisa Lightbourne about what prompted the switch from Promapp to Flowingly, and what the first few weeks looked like.
The Challenge
The council had been using Promapp, but the platform wasn’t getting traction. Staff found it cumbersome, and many had quietly stopped using it — opting for other tools or simply working around it.
“We’d been using a system that was cumbersome and it wasn’t being widely used throughout the business. People were opting to use other products.”
— Donna Officer, Information Management Lead, Tauranga City Council
Lisa saw the disconnect firsthand. When she’d offer to map something in Promapp, the reaction told the story.
“The faces just going, ‘Oh, really? But we don’t use Promapp. What is Promapp?'”
— Lisa Lightbourne, Senior Business Analyst
The council needed something staff would actually pick up and use – without heavy training or constant hand-holding. They also wanted the ability to automate workflows, not just document them, and nothing they’d evaluated could do both well.
The Solution
When Donna first saw Flowingly, her initial reaction was scepticism — but not the kind you’d expect.
“I was like, this is too simple. But then it was actually about the fact that users would use it – because you could create a three-step process in under a minute.”
— Donna Officer, Information Management Lead, Tauranga City Council
The council took a phased approach. Phase one was about getting process mapping into people’s hands. Workflow automation in phase 2, was already building buzz across the business before phase one had fully landed.
The migration from Promapp went smoothly. Lisa led the project as a one-person team – part project manager, part BA, part tester, part trainer – and found the setup and onboarding straightforward. All existing maps, user data, and team structures were validated before the 1 November go-live date, with the Flowingly customer success team providing support throughout.
“The transition from Promapp to Flowingly was seamless. I literally wanted to jump on at midnight to see if it really was live — but it was so seamless.”
— Donna Officer, Information Management Lead, Tauranga City Council
Rather than pushing the platform out to everyone at once, the team trained business champions first. Those champions then started running their own training sessions with their teams — before the formal rollout had even kicked off.
Results
Within four weeks of going live, the council had already seen more staff mapping processes than the previous tool had managed in over a year – and the full rollout hadn’t even started.
“We’re getting people come to us to go, ‘Can we jump in? Can we do it now?’ It’s nice to have people coming to us to ask to use our process mapping tool.”
— Donna Officer, Information Management Lead, Tauranga City Council
Staff picked up the platform with little to no training – most just used a how-to guide on the intranet and ran with it. On the admin side, Lisa found it equally low-maintenance.
“It’s just not complicated. Really easy to support any user issues if they come along.”
— Lisa Lightbourne, Senior Business Analyst
The council is also tapping into cross-council process sharing through the ALGIM and Flowingly partnership. Rather than building common processes like LGOIMA from scratch, they can pull from what other councils have already mapped – saving time and sharing knowledge across the sector.
With automation lined up as phase two, the team is already fielding requests from across the business. As Donna puts it, Flowingly is simply a tool that lets them easily map processes – with the added ability to automate them.