Business Process Optimization in Kincardine
Nestled on the shores of Lake Huron in Bruce County, the Municipality of Kincardine has a population of just under 12,000. Like so many other municipalities, they faced a seismic shift when the pandemic hit, necessitating the closure of the municipal office. This impacted service delivery and interactions with residents and businesses. With just one IT person on staff, they could still move quickly to enable some online processing such as digital signatures.
Taking advantage of the Provincial Modernization Fund, originally announced in 2019, the municipality looked for help to identify what was needed to advance technology with a goal to transform their operations to be more digital leading to greater efficiencies but more importantly, improving the availability of online services for the community and enable the municipal workforce with the right tools to do their jobs.
Perry Group helped them to identify what changes were needed to achieve this as well as to position them for future digital service offerings. During the discovery phase, it was found that most systems were not utilized to their highest potential with many manual processes working around the technology. This manual processing was inhibiting the municipality’s effectiveness and was contributing to inefficiencies and staff frustration.
The project team reviewed all the systems, identified gaps where manual processes were inefficient and considered what changes would have the greatest overall impact on service delivery. The team conducted a prioritization exercise to confirm the best opportunities for improvement and success. Guided by the project team, Perry Group conducted a business process optimization (BPO) review of two critical business processes:
document and records management process; and
internal procure-to-pay process.
The Kincardine municipality embraced the recommendations and ideals of the digital transformation study. As a result, they work with community partners and stakeholders to move towards a digital community, providing exceptional digital services through a digitally enabled workforce.