Baw Baw Shire Council in Victoria's West Gippsland has announced that a new five-year agreement has been signed with TechnologyOne. The Shire's tech upgrade seeks to help streamline council operations to increase efficiency and to deliver enhanced services to residents and visitors.

“Now, more than ever, we need to be effective in the way we manage the council's resources. That means looking for ways to streamline day-to-day operations, reduce duplicated processes and manual data entry and have a single source of truth for data, as well as move more end-to-end processes to digital," said Martin Hopley, Baw Baw Shire Councils Director of Governance and Information Services.

"It also means making use of real-time analytics and reporting that are made possible by an integrated SaaS platform like that of TechnologyOne. We’ll now get a holistic customer view and understand where we’re best to apply our resources in the future as the community's needs grow and change."

As one of Victoria's fastest-growing regions located about 100 kilometres east of Melbourne’s CBD, Baw Baw faces an increasing pressure on community resources due to its rapid population expansion.

To tackle these challenges, the council decided to enhance its operations by replacing existing software used in finance, supply chain management, human resources and property & rating functions with TechnologyOne's modern OneCouncil CiA SaaS solution. Additional TechnologyOne products will be adopted to enhance electronic content management, project lifecycle management and to introduce a new customer-facing digital interface.

Baw Baw supports a community of around 60,000 people over an area of 4,000 square kilometres, a significant task in terms of resource allocation. Therefore, to meet these needs, the council needed to opt for a solution that could be used on the go on any device, as expressed by Mark Dupe, Chief Executive Officer at Baw Baw Shire Council. "But this is also about creating a platform for the future. We plan for the long term and want to continue to thrive as we expect to welcome another 30,000 members to our community over the next 15 years or so."

The tried-and-tested nature of TechnologyOne's SaaS solution, which the council has been using since 2004, played a significant part in their decision to upgrade.

The OneCouncil SaaS solution is currently in use by hundreds of Australian local governments. "We chose TechnologyOne for a variety of reasons. Number one was that its solution was the best one for the job. But they are also very familiar with the needs of Victorian local governments — which means we’re getting a trusted solution, one our people are already familiar with. Importantly, we also felt the solution would grow with us," Mr Hopley added.

Loretta Libke, TechnologyOne's local government expert, added, "We’ve seen Australian councils through every stage of life for more than 30 years. From growing shires to newly established cities, we have partnered with hundreds of councils to understand their needs and develop our market-leading OneCouncil solution. We are so proud to be working with Baw Baw Shire, another growing council in Victoria, to help them deliver the best, most efficient service to its residents and visitors."

With this latest development, Baw Baw Shire Council has commenced implementation of its new TechnologyOne systems.