Published: 15 June 2006
Authority targets a £49,000 per annum reduction in postage costs and Return on Investment (RoI) in just five years
Newbury, 3 May 2006 – Gandlake, the output and e-government systems expert, has used its e-presentment and e-billing solution, Citizen’s Account to change the way Tandridge District Council communicates and interacts with its citizens.
Tandridge District Council can now provide citizens and businesses with a secure and authenticated electronic account to access comprehensive e-statements for Council Tax and Business Rates. Citizens can view online account balances and the breakdown of charges, multi-year history of payment information, instalment plans as well as check receipt of payment and print copies of statements.
In addition to the above the authority can now provide emailed notification to citizens and businesses when new demands become available for them to view online. Tandridge DC produce in excess of 33,000 bills each year with an associated cost of production and postage charges of £49,000 per annum. Citizen’s Account will help to significantly reduce these costs over the next 4-5 years and deliver real tangible return on investment for the authority.
The ability for citizens to answer their own questions, such as balance enquiries online will reduce the 0.75 million telephone calls the authority manages each year and this is expected to provide major service enhancement. Tandridge District Council’s customer service assistants will now have more time to focus on alternative projects. The authority predicts that with just a 15 per cent take-up of the online services, it will achieve Return on Investment (ROI) in just 5 years.
“Gandlake instigated an authority-wide evaluation and review of our existing processes for communicating with citizens,” said Stuart Mitchenall, Head of ICT at Tandridge District Council. “Gandlake’s Citizen’s Account has helped ensure we are achieving the efficiency savings required by The Gershon Efficiency Review and providing enhanced services to citizens. Maintenance and support of the implementation as well as the authentication of all users is managed by Gandlake resulting in minimal impact on our IT infrastructure.”
Tandridge District Council has now also achieved compliance with most government priority outcomes on service delivery. The tangible benefits delivered will feed into Gershon efficiency targets for 2006.
“A great deal of time, money and energy has gone into Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) and achieving Central Government’s priority outcomes and e-targets,” said John Gandley, Managing Director, Gandlake. “Now, in response to Gershon, most local authority senior management teams are focussing their efforts on building auditable efficiency improvements. Gandlake has helped Tandridge District Council to make improvements to its efficiency and the services it delivers to citizens.”
About Gandlake
Gandlake has served the output management and document needs of major organisations for over 30 years. More than 25% of English and Welsh local authorities already use Gandlake’s solutions and services enjoying the benefit of major cash cost savings.
Gandlake Citizen’s Account has been developed specifically to enable local authorities and private organisations to provide T-scheme level authentication, e-presentment of full statements of accounts, and e-Billing. It is not aligned to any particular back end system and enables single sign-on to all of a citizens accounts.
Gandlake provides a Business Process Change service to assist local authorities tackle the subject of Transformational Government. Through this service Gandlake has helped councils meet efficiency targets and save money.
Gandlake’s output management solution, LaserServe, is ideal for any organisation where output is generated from a variety of platforms, locally on or across multiple locations. LaserServe combines data transformation, document composition, sophisticated print management, and multi-channel output including fax, e-mail and SMS, xml and html for web publishing and PDF for intranet browsing.
