Coffs Harbour City Council - enabling community spirit

At Coffs Harbour City Council on the Mid North Coast of NSW, our community’s vision is for a connected, sustainable and thriving future. Our aim is to support our community’s wellbeing and prosperity, while helping it transition into a sustainable and dynamic regional centre. We pride ourselves on having a customer-centric focus to everything that we do. As Group Leader of Business Systems, my role is to help achieve our organisation’s mission through technology. My team and I have been looking at ways we can improve efficiency, provide better customer service, and become more sustainable through a digital-first approach.

Getting down to business

Just a few months ago the council’s technology was causing issues for our organisation. We relied on a fleet of outdated multifunction devices, where each piece of technology was standalone rather than integrated, and was lacking a centralised management system. In summary, our current systems were not as efficient or as cost-effective as we required and that was leading to staff frustration and a concern that it was effecting our ability to provide the best services to the community. My team and I set out to resolve the issues and, although we didn’t know exactly what the solution would look like, we knew that any upgrades had to be customer-centric and digital-first. We outlined the key criteria we were looking for and released requests for quotes through a number of suppliers – which led us to Colourworks.

The results

Colourworks began by considering our problems as a whole and suggesting solutions which would increase our efficiency, cut costs and improve our ability to service the community.  We started off by standardising to two models across the organisation, the Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5560i and C3530i, and chose uniFLOW as our new centralised management platform. This made the management of devices much easier. We chose these models because we wanted colour printing across all devices, not just a few limited devices like we had before. This has empowered our staff members to produce what they need quickly and within their own department. We use uniFLOW with a combination of swipe cards and pins, and every staff member can use the same card they use to access Council’s offices. The transition from our old environment to the new technology was smooth, timely and efficient. From the get-go, we saw a high acceptance from our staff and we’ve reduced downtime significantly.

Gaining uniFLOW has been the most valuable aspect of the upgrade. This system provides cost reports and usage stats from the entire fleet, which we never had before. Having this data on hand helps us identify where most of our printing costs go and how we have significantly reduce wastage. The reports provide a focus on where we need to change behaviours when it comes to printing.

Because the new technology is more sustainable, we’re more in line with our values and those of our community.  For me personally, the digital transformation at Coffs Harbour City Council has involved a lot of investigation, collaboration and careful consideration. With Colourworks, I’ve been able to provide a solution that meets our needs and helps our staff deliver the services the community needs.