East Ayrshire Council is extending the use of its online
booking application to as many of its services as possible in an
effort to increase
efficiency savings.
The Scottish council has been introducing the Connect booking
application from Swedish software supplier Lorensbergs to new
front-line and corporate services throughout 2006 and the first
part of 2007.
A council spokesman said, "The system will ensure that members
of the public can book an appointment and be informed of the
documents they need to bring and who needs to attend appointments
without any initial interaction with council staff. This reduces
the amount of time that employees spend on these activities."
The Connect application was originally used by employees to book
meetings internally. Council officers first tested the application
with members of the public when they enabled people to book PCs in
libraries online.
People can also book times at the council's recreation and
leisure facilities.
The police and health authorities in East Ayrshire have been
given access to the application so that they can book meetings with
council officers.
Connect is replacing all of East Ayrshire's manual processes for
booking council resources. The application will be integrated with
the council's payments application so that online bookings and
payments can be processed seamlessly.
The council said, "The problems that we have encountered in this
project to date have generally been in the area of
business process re-engineering when staff have been required
to adopt new working practices.
"We have overcome these problems by implementing the system on a
pilot basis to enable staff to gain first-hand experience of the
benefits to be gained from the use of the system before the system
is rolled out to a wider audience."
People living in East Ayrshire have to use the council's
Customer Contact Gateway (CCG) as the means of authenticating
themselves. The CCG creates customer accounts that can be used
instead of other means of identification.
East Ayrshire's website was ranked among the seven best council
websites in the UK in a
Society of Information Technology Management survey published
earlier this month.
The council is currently replacing an SAP enterprise resource
planning system with one from Civica.
East Ayrshire's customer authentication system >>
More on
Lorensbergs Connect >>
Council puts self-service applications on the map with GIS
>>
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