Increasing efficiency and accuracy of a complex government system

Timaru's LIM report process was slow and error-prone. With Squiz DXP, they build LIMs faster, with enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and automation.

Lorna Hegarty 06 May 2024

Timaru District Council

Timaru District Council is situated by New Zealand's Southern Alps in the west – serving more than 42,000 residents.

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The challenge

Generating a Land Information Memorandum (LIM) report was a slow process for Timaru District Council. It required data to be manually added by at least 10 different departments. As a result, it took upwards of eight days per report and was prone to human error. It also offered an outdated and inefficient experience for citizens.

As legislations frequently change and the requirements on councils increase, the digital team at Timaru District Council is often requested to add new data or change something within the LIM process. Given the complexity and legality of the system, it was a concern that with every change made, errors could occur.

They made the call early that the easiest way to tackle such a huge project was to recreate the current process with the same data sources but in such a way that new modules could be added.

The existing LIM system was based on around 4,500 lines of code and relied on their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. While this was functional, it didn’t offer the speed, flexibility, or usability that they needed.

The solution

With the Squiz DXP, Timaru has been able to utilize multiple capabilities, to bring together the data sources they need and present them in a way that is clear, intuitive, and critically accurate.

They are leveraging their existing integrations platform and ERP, but the Squiz DXP now extracts the data required and offers a clean and intuitive interface to transform the data and convert it into usable file formats.

They didn’t just see this as an opportunity to improve the LIM system, they recognized that, given the LIM touches almost every area of council, this could be a great launching board to accelerate the digitization of other services.

Squiz has consistently worked in closely with the incredibly talented digital team at Timaru, to ensure they have both technical support and a sounding board for new ideas or challenges.

The results

The citizens of the Timaru District are benefitting from a more accessible and intuitive digital experience, enabling them to access the information and services they need with greater speed and confidence in its accuracy.

Alongside benefits for citizens, Timaru also experiences:

Quicker form build

Reduced time to build the LIM – form generation can now take minutes
Automatic file conversion e.g. jpg attachments change to PDF for inclusion
Extensive GIS integration/spatial querying
Automatic map generation
Automatic supplementary reports
Property with over 100 parcels can be previewed within five minutes of order creation

Reduced burden on internal teams

Zero printing
Automated complex and highly-legalized tasks
Auto stamping attachment sheets, draft/copy watermarks
New automatic attachment index sheet – calculates all page numbers

Increased efficiency

Increased clarity on report status
Users can create test LIMs
Increase data accuracy
Reduced financial burden of the LIM system

On top of all that, Timaru staff are "absolutely loving the new system" – with a new sense of ownership and autonomy over their workloads.

This is a total transformation story and a significant achievement for a local government organization. The LIM system is just the start. The deep and detailed engineering that has gone into it, will form the foundations of a wide range of future digitization opportunities.

The process of generating a LIM now takes just a couple of minutes. Data is automatically pulled into the system, individuals across each department confirm that it is accurate and the end document is automatically generated.

The visibility of the progress of each report has also significantly improved. It is possible to see how long it is taking each department to complete their section and managers can have qualified conversations.

Internal system users are also now able to preview a draft version of each report, with areas highlighted that still need to be completed.

Sustainability

The composability of the Squiz DXP ensures organizations can utilize the technology that works for them at any given time. Squiz says “Come as you are”, there’s no expectation that you rip and replace your current systems, and, with the opportunity to swap tools in and out as you need them, there is minimum wastage of technology and investments.

This has been the foundation of the project with Timaru and has enabled them to develop the tech stack that works for them, without replacing existing tools or adding new data sets.