Walsall Council to modernise revenues and benefits service with SaaS

Walsall Council  has signed a three-year Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) contract for electronic document management (EDM) software from Civica.

The new generation of digital EDM will help modernise the council’s Revenues and Benefits service. The Digital360 software will enable Walsall's team to provide a faster and more efficient service to citizens, whether working in the office or from home.

Covid-19 has driven Walsall’s agile and flexible working policies to the top of the agenda. The new deployment will provide secure cloud access via any connected device, minimising the impact and cost of delivering the solution out to homeworkers. User experience will be improved with an intuitive and responsive browser-based interface and enhanced functionality.

"We are embracing technology which will result in positive outcomes for both our customers and staff," said Jeanette Hitchcock, Project Lead for Walsall Council. "This will form the basis of our process reviews to ensure we achieve value for money while delivering excellent customer experiences."

The contract will bring together rich document management with powerful automation and workflow, and is expected to reduce manual tasks by up to 90% to improve the quality and speed of processing.

Integration with back end systems ensures citizen information is up-to-date, supporting high-quality service delivery without the need of additional resource.

The project will see Walsall migrate its existing on-premise Digital360 platform to future-proof modern technology on Microsoft Azure. The move supports the council’s ICT strategy and cloud-first approach, lowering the cost of internal infrastructure and ongoing costs.

Walsall Council, a Metropolitan Borough Local Authority in the West Midlands , employs around 7,500 staff and has jurisdiction across 20 wards. It supports a growing and culturally diverse population of 280,000, with household numbers growing by 10% over the last decade.