Christchurch Council deploys SAP cloud to boost citizen services

SAP has announced that Christchurch City Council is using SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and the SAP Customer Experience Citizen Engagement Accelerator to reinvent its digital processes and create a better experience for employees and citizens.

"Christchurch City Council is working with SAP on a complete digital transformation into the cloud … to provide tailored digital and citizen-centric services and interactions," SAP said.

The Council's finance systems transformation lead, Michael Day, said the council was a long-term SAP customer so SAP the solution of choice when the council decided to move to the cloud.

The Council’s remit includes managing citizen requests across a range of issues including road repairs, graffiti removal and animal management. Receiving requests, issuing work orders and despatching field service teams to action the requests and provide feedback to citizens was a complex and manual process.

According to SAP with legacy systems in place across 11 different systems, integration was a challenge and made it difficult for the council to mine, organise and action incoming data. The council was unable to automate actions, relying on manual data entry and email reporting," SAP said.

"Since the SAP C/4HANA implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, the council now has the ability to seamlessly manage requests from a variety of channels including mobile, and automatically generate work orders via its ERP system," SAP said

Dana Burnett, My Council programme manager at Christchurch City Council, said a key focus was providing citizens with a range of communication channels to choose from when dealing with the Council.

 “With the deployment of SAP Customer Experience solutions, we’ve developed a digital interface for citizen engagement with the Council," he said.

"Users can now pay for or log requests for services via the website or mobile application, using the integrated camera on a mobile device to capture an image of the issue such as a pothole, Citizens are more empowered, as they now have the ability to elect if and how they want to receive feedback."