There are 62,500 Residential Property Reports that get filed every year to the dept of Building and Safety. The existing process at the time for processing requests from customers for Residential Property Reports was time consuming and tedious for the LADBS staff. It was a manual process, which required the use of NCR reports, and lacked coordinated communication between various groups in the City who need to review, verify, approve and respond to customers in a timely manner on these requests.
Xavor automated a number of these areas, integrated with many of their existing Oracle based systems which not only made the process more streamlined, effective and efficient for the City Staff, but also made it more timely thus improving customer service. Bringing it online also provides the customers the ability to submit RPR requests electronically over the Internet through the LADBS portal, track the status of the requests and download it from the web once it is ready and available.
Business Case for building this product or solution
Since the process was manual, it was very difficult to keep track of where the request for RPR were at a certain time. Additionally the customers had no way of tracking the request by stage of completion. The turnaround time for each RPR was 10-12 days and the City wanted to bring this down to 3-4 days as is required by the ordinance including the research that had to be performed on each RPR. This would improve customer service as well as bring down internal costs resulting in higher profits for the City.
Benefit to the customer (Financial ROI or productivity improvements)
The customer pays $70/ for each RPR request. Due to the time involved and lost RPR's the margins were very low. According to an initial ROI analysis done they are now able to process 50 additional RPR's a day (compared to previously 200 RPR's processed daily.now 250 processed daily). This gives them additional revenue of $700,000/per year. In addition to this due to the streamlining and automation of processes there is a reduction in cost of at least 2 full time employees making the cost saving of about $150,000/year and definite increase in productivity of existing workers.
Customer testimonial and how solution has influenced City of LA
The adoption of a new process has been quite challenging in the beginning for the City and there has been internal resistance. With time and the benefits of the system the adoption of this is becoming very rapid and successful. The new service offering over the Internet has been a huge success from the customers point of view from the beginning.
In the words of the management from LADBS:
"Our employees can easily search and update the Requests for Residential Property Reports as and when information is available. This provides visibility of the request to multiple departments simultaneously for parallel processing. Now our employees can easily respond to our customers in the timeframe they are required to. The data is accurate as there is less human intervention and the cycle time is significantly reduced."
Xavor has been awarded multiple year maintenance and support contract for this and continues to be committed to its customer to bring in more value.