Boomi has announced that Toowoomba Regional Council has implemented the Boomi platform to streamline digital services delivery to residents and drive key initiatives such as its Internet of Things (IoT) water infrastructure project.
Situated in southeast Queensland, Australia, Toowoomba Regional Council (TRC) is home to more than 180,000 residents. The council is currently undergoing an experience-motivated technology transformation, using data to improve digital services for residents — from maintenance requests, to water payments, to managing development applications.
“Community services must complement the digital lives of locals,” said Mark Godfrey, Senior Integration Developer at TRC. “They need to be timely and accessible by residents, while easily maintained by council staff. We sought to implement a data framework that would create a common understanding of what’s happening across the council so processes can happen without fuss, and enable us to respond to the community faster and reduce organizational risk.”
TRC replaced manual, point-to-point integrations with the Boomi platform, connecting business-critical applications, including its electronic document management system; ERP software; people, property, and regulatory software; property development portal, smart parking system, and waste services system. With data silos and information duplications eliminated, TRC has streamlined several public-facing processes, including property development documentation.
“In the past, residents reported that documents were going missing online, which would prompt the IT team to investigate and manually amend systems – this would take hours. Now, we’re no longer allowing antiquated processes to impact our engagement with residents, nor allowing it to hinder our governance,” said Godfrey.
He added, “With Boomi, we’re able to meet state government requirements by ensuring development documents are available for public consumption. At the same time, we are gaining a better understanding of how residents interact with us. From capturing metrics on public requests to issuing alerts, we’re able to respond to documentation demand and problems in real time. This gives our technology improvements meaning – it’s not just advancement in the IT room, it’s also advancement for people and processes.”
As part of its smarter infrastructure strategy, TRC is also undergoing a major water infrastructure refresh.
Godfrey stated, “We’re pulling out more than 64,000 home and business water meters and replacing the aging infrastructure with smart meters over the next three years. Instead of relying on manual meter readings, Boomi’s intelligent and low-code platform synchronizes with Iota Services – our IoT partner – to pull meter data and ensure the information flows where it needs to go.
“Toowoomba only recently pulled out of a drought, so access to leak detection data in real time is a huge benefit. But without Boomi, none of this information would be available to Council, or our integrated partners.”
He continued, “The automation that’s now just part of our DNA has the added benefit of giving many employees time back in their day by cutting out administrative tasks such as data entry and retrieval. So much so, we now have non-technical team members asking for Boomi-led improvements to things we previously had no answer for.”
Looking ahead, TRC will use Flow, Boomi’s workflow automation solution, to elevate overall resident experience. This will include developing online forms such as direct debit requests. Currently, residents must download, sign, and scan paper-based requests, and then staff manually triage these requests. Boomi Flow will streamline the process by making digital signing possible and automating internal triaging.
Other Flow projects will see TRC establish a 360-degree view of resident information within a single interface. With a complete view of everything from pets listed and properties registered, to rates payments, TRC employees will be able to respond to citizen inquiries more quickly and with a firmer understanding of their needs.
“Australians have come to expect top quality digital services from organizations, and that extends to the councils which oversee their places of residence,” said Nathan Gower, Director of Australia and New Zealand at Boomi. “Convoluted processes are not acceptable. Boomi has given TRC the ability to remove inefficiencies and better meet its region’s specific requirements while maintaining accountability over the taxpayer dollars it spends.”
