Can Government benefit from innovation and digital transformation proven in the Private Sector?

Chris Haden, CEO of Engeneum Limited, tells us about Private Sector Innovation that could equally provide public sector with improved efficiency, greater accuracy, and cost savings

How to get the most from this article! There are five sections; Finance, Customer Services, Homeworking, Transformation – pick the one most relevant to you to avoid information overload.

Finance

Scena Ltd is one of the UK’s leading creative construction companies and have implemented an Engeneum end-to-end supplier invoice processing solution that has reduced processing time by over 60%.

This system manages both paper and digital supplier invoices in many different formats and has removed the need for time consuming manual entry and checking. By saving Scena 60% of the time to process invoices it has enabled the finance team the time to concentrate on managing the data and exploit the direct Sage™ Link.

Scena’s volume of incoming invoices was huge, and the volume of paperwork was becoming unmanageable. It would take on average 3 days per week to process, let alone interpret, the inbound invoices.

The software reads the data from all the invoices, then verifies against supplier details to prevent fraud. It then matches invoices against purchase orders to check validity and provides payment approval and query resolution workflows to ensure accuracy and financial controls. The validated invoices then go directly to Sage for payment. You can read the full case study here: https://tinyurl.com/cuer6wy9

Customer Services

East Midlands Railway (EMR) have implemented a state-of-the-art e-mail and document classification solution that has reduced response times to client queries from a typical 20-day response to less than 1-day, dramatically reducing their key performance indicator (kpi).

This classification solution is handling over 65,000 incoming emails improving customer response times, increasing productivity, saving costs and has saved EMR at least 5 manual hours per day.

The implementation of advanced classification has automated the email process by capturing key data from the emails content and document attachments.

The solution classifies emails without any manual input and the data is routed to the EMR Charter CRM system automatically. The product is easily adaptable, and changes can be made in-house. The process is straight forward and the system is ‘trained’ using subsets of document types, and then tuned to ensure the internal operational structure is supported and maintained.

The technology can be adapted to handle multiple inbound e-mail channels, as well as handling any scanned paper documents in any format. You can read the full case study here: https://tinyurl.com/npbhaezb

Human Resources (HR)

OPTiM Payroll (Galway) are exploiting the Engeneum e-payslip portal to provide real-time, 24x7x365 secure access to payslips for employees and payroll managers.

No need for changes to the 3 different payroll software packages, the solution just up-loads and interprets the existing payslip reports.

Save considerable time! There is no need to password protect every payslip, and no need to e-mail payslips to each user which takes time and is inherently insecure software.

The system is independent of the payroll software package and can be white labelled/ re-branded. There is also a payroll report sign-off and management workflow options.

The solution includes optional Employee Portal and Personal Data Store (PDS) functions that integrate easily.

The configuration enables complaint handling of all employee related documents, and covers UK Data Protection, Irish Data Protection and EU General Data Protection (GDPR) regulations.

Implementing these tools can readily fit into the “Spend to Save” arena as the projects consistently have significant cost and time saving elements.

Nottinghamshire County Council are our major public sector user of this leading-edge technology with over 30,000 concurrent users. You can read the full case study here: https://tinyurl.com/8dkhudyw

Homeworking

The Engeneum product architecture was built using a layered security solution to ensure data is secure at all times. Its flexible configuration allows access to individuals, and or, groups in a dynamic way whilst remaining access control at all times.

By utilising Microsoft’s powerful Azure platform this architecture has allowed many organisations enable homeworking employees gain access to corporate and client data via a secure browser, removing concerns over data loss as the information always remains in the secure Engeneum database.

Migration, or divide and conquer (re-purpose)

Many organisations need to move forward and develop their use of technology to stay both efficient and competitive, but they are held back by the board requiring them to retain data for business continuity and compliance reasons. This brings the need to migrate all historical data, or does it…?

The Engeneum approach is different; we take the legacy data that must be retained, and convert it into searchable, manageable indexed document records allowing the new solution to go live with minimal data transfer. This approach avoids the high cost, high risk, and the potential ‘holding back’ of the new solution because the old data doesn’t quite fit which attempting full migration often creates. The Engeneum solution is then a read-only repository of the old data, held securely for access as required.

This approach is invaluable when multiple parties with different solutions are involved. Mergers and acquisitions or government structure changes.

Summary

My summary is that both local and central government can get considerable benefits from implementing solutions proven in the private sector.

The old huge monolithic database solutions don’t need to be replaced with new huge monolithic modern solutions, but instead use secure connected, loosely coupled function specific solutions that are low risk as they have been tried tested and proven to give benefits across all type of private sector businesses world-wide.

‘Spend to Save’ and pay less using proven existing applications.

Please note: This is a commercial profile

© 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.