Newcastle City Council boosts sustainability with digitisation

Newcastle City Council has improved its sustainability with a digital transformation initiative expected to save 12 tons of paper annually.

The council selected TechnologyOne to transition its manual, paper-based payroll processes with a digital system powered by TechnologyOne’s CiA platform.

Council CTO Alicia Lopez said the environmental impact of the move is expected to be one of the biggest benefits of the digitisation project. “We expect to save approximately 12 tons of paper a year by moving to automated Accounts Payable, equating to one billion litres of water saved,” she said.

The Newcastle City Council was already one of the first local governments in New South Wales to make the switch to 100% renewable electricity.

Another major benefit of the migration is in time saved by staff, according to the council’s Executive Director of Corporate Services, David Clarke.

“Staff were manually filling out timesheets, scanning them and emailing them to payroll. Some even had to drive timesheets to various office locations. It was highly inconvenient," he said. “Now timesheets are all digital, about 80% of that manual repetitive data entry work will disappear and our team will be able to pivot to do more value-adding work.”

Finally, the platform will provide managers with a real-time view of operational costs to help them to make more informed decisions, Clarke added.

The council plans to continue its digital transformation by migrating additional TechnologyOne products to the CiA platform throughout the year.

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