MAXIMISING EFFICIENCY 

In 2016, Wandsworth and Richmond councils created a new shared workforce to deliver cost-effective services for both areas. Moving their revenues and benefits systems into our cloud was a continuation of that programme, as application coordinator Kirsty Black explains: “We moved to the cloud in 2018 to reduce our costs and get support from their experts. Users noticed the benefits straight away and the latest improvements have taken it to the next level.”

At the end of 2019, the councils’ applications were moved to NEC’s state-of-the-art data centre, driving performance even higher and enabling a great user experience.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT 

The move made a noticeable difference to the 150 daily users. By June 2020, average refresh rates had reached a low of 0.4 seconds, compared to 0.9 seconds back in 2018. But it was in annual billing where they felt the biggest difference.

In 2019, running the annual billing took a total of 60 hours across both councils. In 2020, it reduced by 70% to just 17.5 hours.

LOOKING AHEAD 

In the next stage of improvements, the councils will be migrating additional services, including business rates, from a third party supplier into NEC Revenues & Benefits and running them in-house.