Central Coast Council improves performance and cybersecurity with Oracle Cloud
Oracle Cloud apps and OCI enhance Central Coast Council’s organizational capabilities and improve service delivery for employees and the community.
“Cybersecurity is a key focus area for us. It's a real advantage to have an integrated solution across ERP, HCM, and CX. As part of our annual external audit, we can demonstrate that we are managing public funds in a safe, secure, and effective way.”
Business challenges
Australia’s sixth-largest council has some 328,000 residents and expects another 88,000 by 2040 with the economy projected to grow by $21 billion. The governing body wanted to improve its technology services by updating and streamlining its digital infrastructure in order to meet increasing demands for better digital services from both council employees and community members. It inherited technology challenges such as duplicate legacy enterprise systems and many paper-based processes that created laborious, time-consuming effort and reduced productivity.
For example, there were multiple ways to manage employee performance reviews, making it difficult for both employees and managers to gain insights into future goals. “We do have an ageing workforce and as such, meaningful career discussions and appropriate succession planning are critical to ensure that we have a really strong talent pipeline,” says Krystie Bryant, unit manager of people and culture.
A single way of doing business and streamlined processes not only allowed us to maintain data integrity, but to help ensure the security of that information as well.
Why Central Coast Council chose Oracle
After performing an assessment of products in the market, Central Coast Council selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, including Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle CX as its strategic solutions. These applications would consolidate the council’s core business processes for finance, procurement, inventory, workforce management, and customer relationship management to streamline operations and improve business capability. The council also decided to move its Oracle EBS payroll to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to enhance reliability, availability, and security.
Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM reduced the time required for the performance review cycle from months to weeks and also increased the employee take-up rate from 70% to 96%.
Results
Implementing Oracle Cloud Applications gave Central Coast Council one version of the truth across HR and financial reporting. The governing body now has a flexible and secure system that enables better reporting, faster performance management, and a massive reduction of manual processes.
After adopting Oracle Cloud HCM, managers could more easily conduct performance reviews and some 2,000 council employees could provide their feedback swiftly. “The power that comes with employee performance data allows us to do adequate succession planning and talent mapping and understand where opportunities lie or where we need to invest more effort,” says Bryant.
The council also tapped Oracle CX for customer relationship management (CRM). For example, if someone wants to file a complaint about a barking dog, a portal leads residents through a guided interview so that the council has the details it needs up front to serve citizens better.
In addition, migrating EBS payroll to OCI with Enterprise Database Service and Virtual Machine delivered better performance, security, and reliability. It also helped the council avoid expensive hardware upgrades while also delivering more flexibility in operating costs versus capital costs. But it is more than cost optimization, according to O’Carroll. “It's future-proofing us, giving us that assurance that our system is running in a secure environment. You have all the cloud compliance certifications and the disaster recovery capability, so that's really what we were looking for in risk management. It has also enabled us to decommission legacy IT infrastructure, reducing our environmental impact and energy consumption.”
Adopting a cloud-based SaaS solution also helped the organization adjust license volumes based on usage. This reduced the frequency and impact of IT outages, resulting in productivity gains by freeing up staffers to deliver more value to the organization.
Partners
Working with Oracle partner Accenture, Central Coast Council implemented Oracle Cloud HCM Performance and Goals Management as well as Talent Management within six months. Accenture and Oracle solution architects also helped the council in executing another seamless migration from EBS to OCI, allowing the council to overcome legacy roadblocks and drive a broad technological change.
“The partnership with Oracle and Accenture was a highly collaborative process,” says Bryant. “The collective spirit and commitment to achieving the best outcome with an equal amount of heavy lifting from both parties really made a difference to the end result.”
About the customer
Central Coast Council is the local governing body for the Central Coast region in New South Wales, Australia. The council has a land area of about 650 miles and a population of about 328,000.