“Inspectors don’t have to call-in or come back to the office to look at paperwork or research data anymore. It’s all done from the field, which is important because the other city departments involved aren’t held up by our process.”
“We’ve become incredibly transparent. The most important thing for us is that it took a division that was siloed in individual data management systems and brought us all under one system.”
“The fact that we did all that work up-front, before the project started really paid off. We thought through processes; made lists of exactly what fields we wanted to capture, and drafted what the reports would look like, We also engaged our entire team for input, and it was absolutely integral to have both back-office and field users at the table, so they could buy into the process."
"I'd rather spend our resources on our innovation and not on the hardware. We spend too much time trying to update our servers when we should be focused on the technology. A cloud-based environment lets us do that."
"We’ve got communications occurring between field staff and their supervisors—and it’s happening in real time right from the field."
“We have 89 jurisdictions that we contract with on a regular basis, which means a lot of users to maintain at any time. We not only save them money, but we also make it easier for customers so they have a consistent experience.”
"We are a very diverse community… The one thing the public wants is accessibility right away, right when they wake up in the morning."
"Accela allows us to be more strategic with our investments. For infrastructure improvement, we used to do it just on the age of the pipe and that's not very strategic. Now, we're leveraging this information to see where our worst spots are, and we'll repair those first so we can enhance the life of our existing materials."
"Electric, gas and telcom utilities had informal communications in the past, but would rarely share costs. Now we have one centralized data center and an online forum that allows them to communicate, coordinate and reduce their costs."
"Our plan reviewers need to view maps when reviewing site plans, plats, building plans, and historical aerial photos. Accela GIS seamlessly consumes Esri data, and that enables everything to work well together."
“With Asset Management, we can track all our assets. If we had a flood event, we would be able to track where we were having overflows so we can direct construction projects to those areas of greatest need. It has improved workflow. It has better enabled us to track areas of need for the sake of planning future construction and capital construction projects.”
"The main goal is to make government easier to do business within the State of Michigan by streamlining processes across multiple departments and providing a single point of entry, making the experience seamless for our citizens."
“Permitting is permitting. You have an owner, you have a facility, you go out and perform inspections and you track compliance. Anyone who is doing permitting, enforcement and compliance — Accela Environmental Health is a perfect fit, no matter what industry you are talking about.”
“The great thing about this product and why we chose it is that the video of each meeting is integrated with the meeting documents and it also has time-stamp features, making it easy for staff and citizens to quickly find what they are interested in. I love that transparency. It just makes it so much easier.”
“Our departments understand that the Civic Platform is a kind of generic platform that can be customized and used with many different business processes. It’s a platform they can change and continually use to improve their own business process.”