Council Delivers Rapid Success with Toplevel Shared Services

Like many authorities, Horsham District Council needs to achieve much with limited resources. A shared service centre solution from Toplevel has allowed the council to get transactional services online quickly and cost effectively, while freeing staff for other projects.

Based on the town of Horsham, but providing services over an area of 205 square miles that takes in 23 villages, Horsham District Council serves a population of 124,000 and has an annual budget of around £55 million. For several years, the council used software run in house to make forms available on its website for service users to print off and fill out. Although this approach allowed the council to e-enable many of its processes in a basic fashion, it struggled to meet the target for 100% e-enablement in some departments because of the development effort involved in creating electronic versions of forms. Council staff and service users were also seeing little benefit from this approach, since staff still faced the same delays and difficulties in processing hard-to-read forms completed by hand.

Horsham decided to review the way it supported online transactions by evaluating what the two authorities which Horsham is working in partnership on a number of shared services initiatives, were using. One of these authorities, Adur District Council, is a long-term user of the Toplevel shared services solution, and they suggested Horsham could also benefit from Toplevel's library of hosted transactional services.

Reviewing the library, the heads of Council Tax and Planning at Horsham identified a number of transactions offered by the Toplevel shared services centre that they felt Horsham could use immediately. "It was a quick way to get more transactions onto our site to meet our targets, even though we only had limited resources in house," says Tony Hill, Systems Development Manager at Horsham. "With Toplevel, there's no development time involved: we had our first transaction hosted by Toplevel on our website in hours."

Horsham is now using the Toplevel shared service to allow users to fill in around twenty e-forms online, across the Council Tax and Planning departments, before printing them off for signing. "Forms that have been filled in online are much easier for staff to process, so they can turn them around more quickly," Hill points out. He adds that, although current legislation requires printed forms with signatures, the Toplevel shared service provides Horsham with the ideal platform to move quickly to delivering complete online transactions when the council is ready to do so.

Horsham also benefits from the economies of scale that come from using a shared service and from leveraging work done by other Toplevel customers in developing e-enabled transactions. These economies will allow Horsham to provide robust, high-quality transactional services for citizens and businesses more quickly, and at a lower cost, than would be possible with an in-house solution.

Hill says, "We've demonstrated with these first twenty processes that using the standard transactions from the Toplevel library, rather than having them customised to match our previous paper-based forms, doesn't affect the ability of staff to do their jobs, since the Toplevel-hosted transactions still capture all the necessary information." He thinks the Toplevel managed service will give Horsham a real advantage as it moves forward with online transactions for the 'One Form' scheme that aims to have the same forms countrywide for all planning applications.

Hill concludes, "Toplevel's shared services solution has freed up our resource to work on other projects, enabling us to do more work in the same timeframe and get the right projects in at the right time. The shared services solution is always reliable and available, and Toplevel is very responsive. When we wanted a change to the validation for a field, we just had to send them an email, and they had the new version working within a day."

To complement its use of the Toplevel shared service centre, Horsham has also recently purchased Toplevel's e-bookings solution, which will be run in house. According to Hill, Horsham chose Toplevel because "it's a very flexible solution, while being significantly cheaper than alternatives."