Pendle Borough Council is predominantly a rural region in Lancashire covering an area of 65.4 square miles and serving a population of approximately 90,000 people. With increasing pressure on resources, improving efficiency is key to meeting the increased demand to deliver improved access and better services to its residents and visitors. In 2015, Pendle identified a need to rationalise systems across the authority, with a view to reducing costs and overheads as well as enabling more streamlined processes within the council.
The council was using a number of different solutions to support core customer facing services. Pendle engaged Idox to help build a business case to understand how they could benefit from the adoption of a more corporate approach through consolidation of their existing back office systems.
Pendle selected Idox to replace 18 of their existing systems with one integrated software suite. The project commenced in September 2015 and, in the first of a series of staged go-lives for Pendle, the council successfully went live in April 2016 with Idox Planning and Building Control. This included a full migration of documents from its existing Document Management System.
By adopting this approach, it has helped the council to improve data sharing between services, reduce data duplication, save time by enhancing customer self–service by reducing the need for face to face or telephone contact but also lowered their annual costs for systems and infrastructure.
Neil Watson, Planning, Building Control and Licensing Services Manager at Pendle Borough Council commented: “We are very pleased to be working with Idox to bring an integrated software system forward. Not only will this make us more cost effective but will allow us to align our services to the public better across all departments. This will make us a more efficient and resilient organisation better able to deal with the demands of modern society.”