The municipality has recently been awarded the 2013 Customer Innovation Award in the Digital Transformation category, at the 2013 Innovation World Conference, recently held in San Francisco, USA.
Chosen from dozens of global nominations, Ekurhuleni was announced as the Digital Transformation award winner due to its highly improved customer-facing processes.
The municipality consists of 20 customer care centres (CCCs) and various service departments.
These entities’ business processes and technologies were not standardised or integrated, in many cases causing duplication of work and cumbersome service-delivery processes.
By leveraging on the webMethods and ARIS solutions provided by Software AG, service delivery was optimised throughout different departments: energy; water and sanitation; corporate and legal; city planning; and health and social services.
Prior to the automation solution, Ekurhuleni’s Indigent Management process spanned way over three months before qualifying applicants were approved.
This process has been drastically reduced and applicants’ waiting time decreased by up to 70 days.
Now it takes 21 days for approval, with 1 500 applications being processed per month across all the CCCs.
“The recognition at a global level is an indication that the city is moving in the right path in its Digital City strategy which, among other things, seeks to ensure that we are continuously re-engineering our business processes to optimise service delivery,” said city manager Khaya Ngema.
“It is imperative for us to ensure we enhance our customers’ experience when interacting with us.
“The 2013 Global Award for ICT Innovation highlights our commitment in streamlining internal processes to achieve efficiency as a municipality.”
The Digital City is one of the municipality’s nine flagship projects, which are part of the Growth and Development Strategy 2055.
It is an overarching strategy to take the growth and development of the city forward by modernising and capacitating the municipality.
Innovation World is Software AG’s annual global technology conference which gives global recognition to customers, such as Ekurhuleni, that significantly optimises their enterprise structure through the innovative use of Software AG technology.
