Northern Sydney Regional Organization of Councils (NSROC)

SUMMARY

The Northern Sydney Regional Organization of Councils (NSROC) uses PMWeb to manage a 10-year $300 million contract for waste services, with workflows to manage invoice approvals and cost-sharing across participating Councils – as well as a number of special-purpose reporting functions.

OVERVIEW

The NSROC Region is an economic powerhouse for Sydney and NSW, producing around $50.5 billion in gross regional product or 11.0 percent of the State’s gross product (2012). The region covers an area of over 700 square kilometers lying between the Hawkesbury River and Sydney Harbour and is home to more than 600,000 people.

CHALLANGE

This PMWeb implementation was for a system to manage a 10-year $300+ million contract for Waste Services entered into by six (6) Local Government Councils. In addition to providing a full range of Contract Management functionality, a number of special-purpose Dashboards and Control Forms were configured to provide the Councils with both specific control tools and “at a glance” visibility of Contract status. In addition to contract management, PMWeb provides some key functionalities to the councils in their joint effort to track and manage their waste management services within the NSROC region, including but not limited to:

• Truck movement changes.
• Monthly waste data validation.
• Monthly payment validation.
• Tracking and reporting of unlawful wastes.
• Incident reporting and tracking at the waste facilities.
• Tracking of their monthly disposable and recoverable waste volume.
• Excess residency at the waste facility.

Automated workflows generate notifications and reminders for actions to be taken for the responsible parties, such as invoice approvals. Reports and Out-of-the-Box features enable tracking of all completed or pending tasks with clear visibility on Ball-In-Court. It allows transparent and effective resolution of issues related to waste service management.

PMWeb’s document management feature also acts as the central repository for all waste-related documents. Moreover, the system enables any new council to join the NSROC platform with ease. A new council has recently been added to the system within three weeks, including the necessary training for the users.

SOLUTION

This implementation is an example of how quickly a PMWeb implementation can be deployed and is of direct relevance to clients considering PMWeb for a number of reasons:

•  Service delivery is by Software as a Service (SaaS), using Amazon Web Services and an Amazon Private Cloud, restricting data solely to Australia
•  The SaaS service was up and running within seven (7) days of Contract execution, making the system available for interaction with NSROC users to facilitate both familiarisation and configuration discussions
•  The implementation was completed within 30 days of the SaaS facility being commissioned
•  Stakeholder engagement requirements included working with representatives of five separate local councils, each with varying interests.

It should be noted that this implementation is specifically for Contract Management.

SERVICES PROVIDED
Service activated and implementation completed from December 2015 to January 2016. Level 3 support is ongoing. We are currently (June/July 2020) conducting refresher training as part of on-boarding a new Council (Mosman).

RESULTS AND BENEFITS

The outcome was a success, with completion of the implementation in a rapid timeframe as noted above. A key challenge was finalizing requirements across the initial five separate Councils, which was managed through formal Workshops and one-on-one meetings. A further challenge was that Willoughby Council’s participation did not start until some months after the other four Councils were using the system. This required additional training sessions using the standard documentation developed for the initial training. The implementation has operated with approximately 30 users since January 2016 with no downtime during Council business hours. Periodic system upgrades also performed without disrupting the business.