HILLS SHIRE COUNCIL
The Hills Shire Council uses myFLO as the foundation for their Electronic Work Order Distribution system. Their system distributes work orders to field staff in real time. myFLO helped them stop using paper, and improved their customer service levels.
The problem: Wants a paperless work management system.
Outcomes:
- Full electronic work management system
- Integration with existing financial system
- Seamless data flow and automatic updates
- Almost no administrative intervention
Background
The Hills Shire Council (THSC) is one of Sydney’s largest and fastest growing councils. It has 29 suburbs, 4 localities and covers an area of 380 square kilometres. The 160-strong Operations team of THSC is responsible for all the major operational areas of the group. This includes roads, parks, plant and building operations.
The Operations team receives maintenance requests in a number of ways. They can be reactive works, requests from customers, or or even identified whilst on the job. Then there is also the planned maintenance programs.
The paper-based work order system used by THSC looked like this:
- Print the work orders
- Sort work orders manually, and put into the right team’s pigeon hole for pickup
- Times, outputs and notes for each work order written out manually
- Processing of manual timesheets for over 100 staff
- Re-entering work order data manually.
The Council’s existing system was inefficient and expensive
There were a number of inefficiencies and issues in the process. They included:
- Interpretation of handwriting on work order notes
- Loss of data when handwritten notes are illegible
- High costs and poor environmental footprint as a result of printing work orders
- Delays in receipt of work orders, because it relied on teams coming back to the operations centre
- High levels of ‘busy work’: Work like printing and sorting that adds no value
- Time wasted processing manual timesheets, which was also subject to error.
The solution - and what happened next
myFLO won the tender to provide a solution for The Hills Shire Council. Our team worked closely with team to review and analyse their processes. We were able to give them a system that was customised to fit in seamlessly with existing systems. The myFLO system they received requires almost no intervention from coordinators and administration staff.
The myFLO solution we provided allowed THSC’s work orders to be passed to field staff directly, in real time. Workers out in the field now receive work orders on their mobile devices (tablets) in real time, and are able to view all the information related to that job.
The result is that the Hills Shire Council can now:
- Electronically pass work orders directly to outdoor staff from their asset system
- Track work order progress
- Electronically reassign work
- Sort/filter outstanding work orders by urgency, location, work type
- Create work orders out in the field
- Record completion details electronically and interface with the asset system
- Easily administer and maintain a database of human and plant resources
- Produce electronic timesheets for over 100 staff, which exports to the payroll system.
The Hills Shire Council found that myFLO Enterprise exceeded their requirements. It does everything they hoped it would, and delivered efficiency savings beyond the project’s initial scope.
The system automatically calculates the time spent on the job for the entire team, for plant usage, and it automatically calculates travel time in between jobs. All timesheets are electronically generated, and allow users to adjust them as required, before they go through the Council’s approval process. The timesheet was designed to be flexible and require minimal interaction from users in form of calculating overtime, higher duties allowances, leave, and so on.
The system also provides teams with the ability to:
- reassign work orders to different teams
- invite teams to work on the same work order
- create brand new work orders
These can happen all in real time, from mobile devices. By integrating myFLO Enterprise with the Council’s finance system, any work orders created in the field are automatically created in the finance system without any interaction required.
What Hills Shire Council had to say
“myFLO enables us to forward works requests directly to our teams in the field resulting in improved customer service”
– Michael Lathlean (Manager, Operations)