The City of Ekurhuleni has been awarded the 2013 Customer Innovation Award in the Digital Transformation category at the 2013 Innovation World conference in San Francisco, USA.
Efforts to turn Ekurhuleni into a digital city are beginning to yield fruits, as the municipality was chose from dozens of global nominations. The city was announced as the Digital Transformation award winner due to its highly improved customer processes.
City of Ekurhuleni manager, Khaya Ngema said, “The recognition at a global level is an indication that the city is moving in the right path in its Digital City strategy which, among other things, seeks to ensure we are continuously re-engineering our business processes to optimise service delivery. It is imperative for us to ensure we enhance our customers’ experience when interacting with us. The 2013 Global Award for ICT Innovation highlights our commitment in streamlining internal processes to achieve efficiency as a municipality.”
The municipality consists of 20 Customer Care Centres (CCCs) and various service departments. These entities’ business processes and technologies were not standardised or integrated, in many cases causing duplication of work and cumbersome service-delivery processes. Service delivery was optimised throughout different departments including energy, water and sanitation, corporate and legal, city planning, and health and social services.
Prior to the automation solution, Ekurhuleni’s indigent management process spanned three months before qualifying applicants were approved. This process has been drastically reduced and applicants’ waiting time decreased by up to 70 days. Now it takes 21 days for approval with 1 500 applications being processed per month across all the CCCs.
