Customer Overview

Burwood Council, strategically located halfway between the Sydney CBD and Parramatta, is a culturally diverse Local Government Area, located in the Inner West region of Sydney, New South Wales.

Spanning across 7 square kilometres, the area has a population of more than 40,832 living in the suburbs of Burwood, Burwood Heights, Croydon, Croydon Park, Enfield and Strathfield. With many parks, retail outlets, schools and community facilities to enjoy, Burwood is a perfect place to live, work and study.               

The Challenge

Burwood Council faces significant challenges as its population is projected to nearly double by 2036, reaching 73,500 residents. This rapid growth brings heightened demands for housing, transportation, education, healthcare, and various services. Managing these demands while maintaining quality infrastructure and planning for future developments presents a complex undertaking for the council.

To address these challenges effectively, Burwood Council recognised the need to streamline operations, enhance automation, and reduce costs while ensuring operational efficiencies and meeting the diverse needs of its community.

Fab Zincone, Director of Corporate Services at Burwood Council, said: "We have considered the significant challenges ahead in planning for Burwood’s future. As our city grows, local services and infrastructure will become increasingly more important.

"From an organisational perspective, what’s important for us is how we manage places and serve people. This is ultimately underpinned by our ERP system, which is a crucial component of our journey."

The Approach to Transformation

In response to these challenges, Burwood Council has embarked on a comprehensive business transformation journey. This transformation aims to align the council's current and future business requirements with its overarching digital strategy.

The council envisions a future where technology empowers the organisation to better serve its community, by optimising processes and adapting to changing needs effectively.

Zincone elaborates: "Our aim is to modernise our operations, increase efficiency, and better respond to the needs of our growing community. Technology plays a vital role in enabling us to achieve these objectives."

At its core, the transformation involves consolidating disparate systems into a unified platform to streamline processes, improve data visibility, and foster collaboration across departments.

Moreover, the council is committed to enhancing the digitisation of customer experiences, aiming to deliver intuitive and user-centric services. By fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, Burwood Council seeks to position itself as a leader in delivering public services that are responsive, efficient, and future-ready.

Spotlight on Customer Centricity

The key motivator for Burwood Council’s transformation is improving the customer experience, which goes hand-in-hand with improving business processes, says Zincone.

“It’s not just about delivering a customer experience, but delivering a very good one. Digitisation alone doesn’t necessarily equate to improvement; rather it’s about integrating digitisation with solid internal foundations to enhance the overall customer experience,” Zincone said.

When considering the customer experience more broadly, Zincone highlights the importance of identifying aspects that would genuinely improve people's lives. While this might appear subjective, for customers it ultimately translates into practical outcomes such as avoiding transferred phone calls, or achieving near-instant results through online self-service, which were previously time-consuming processes.

“I think the important thing to understand when approaching customer centricity as a council, is that our community’s expectations are not shaped by what the council next door is doing, but by their everyday interactions, including those with consumer brands like Amazon and JB HIFI,” Zincone says.

We ask ourselves: how does the customer feel when they've completed a transaction with us? Ideally it should be a feeling of being pleasantly surprised or at least satisfied and if we just copy what everyone else in the industry is doing, we'd be unlikely to be in that space where we're meeting or exceeding expectations.

“What we saw in the Ready Community platform is that promise, that value proposition of a modern software product based on modern tools, that will allow us deliver a truly modern customer experience.”

Partnership with ReadyTech

As part of its transformation journey, Burwood Council has forged a strategic partnership with ReadyTech. The council will transition from separate solutions to a unified, ERP platform, Ready Community, to support Council’s digital strategy using simple, smart, and secure ICT project principles.

ReadyTech’s Ready Community solution is built for local governments and incorporates core back-office functionality including Financials, Payroll and Property and Rates, coupled with a modern front-end customer-facing portal.

“We are committed to enhancing the efficiency of our business processes. We're very keen to remove red tape, speed things up, make things available 24/7 wherever possible, and we see the Ready Community solution as one of the catalysts for that,” Zincone said.

“Currently, we have two ERP systems, and it means that we’re not able to effectively concentrate on either of them, resulting in resource allocation being stretched thin.

“So, there was a real incentive for us to adopt a single system capable of delivering all of those different modules and functionalities, so that we could then work with that partner to push the boundaries.”

Moving to the Ready Community ERP platform will enable Burwood to integrate business processes across the organisation, increase automation of business processes across applications, and reduce effort, resources and costs of having to manage disparate ERP solutions.

Pushing the boundaries is something that both Burwood Council, and Zincone personally, are very passionate about.

“Burwood Council aspires to be an innovator and a leader in the industry, and we see a partnership with our technology vendors as the way to achieve that,” Zincone said.