How Environmental Health Technology Enhances City Efficiency

Organization Profile

• Industry: Municipal
• Location: Edina, Minnesota
• Number of Employees: Full-time: 270
• Population: Over 53,000
• Tyler Client Since: 2018
• Tyler Products/Solutions: Enterprise Environmental Health, Enterprise Permitting & Licensing, Enterprise ERP, Enterprise Utilities

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Challenges

The city of Edina sits immediately at the southwest cusp of Minneapolis (Hennepin County, to be more specific) and has a population of over 53,000. This vibrant, older, yet prosperous suburb in a growing metropolitan region is best known for its luxurious housing, shopping and dining, beautiful parks and recreational facilities, and the excellent quality of life for residents. Benefitting from its proximity to Minneapolis and the broader economic and social trends, this city attracts both young families and mature residents.

Edina’s Public Health Division safeguards access to a wide range of public health services that benefit residents, businesses, and visitors, and ensuring the health and safety of its community is of utmost importance. Managing their environmental health programs was timeconsuming. The system they used for managing complaints, issuing licenses, and conducting inspections required many manual steps and was isolated from other city software systems, resulting in too much time spent on system administration. “Our existing system was functional but not great. We had to do a lot of manual data transfer and track things in multiple software systems,” shared Jeff Brown, community health administrator for the city. They needed modern, automated software that would streamline processes and provide more transparency.

Solution

An existing Tyler client, the city chose to implement Tyler’s Enterprise Environmental Health software. This application allows staff to manage operational permit licenses, recurring inspection cycles, and complaints for a single business in one place.

Tyler’s solution automated and streamlined how the city manages licensing, inspections, and enforcement for their expansive range of programs, including food, pools, lodging, body art, tobacco, THC edibles, refuse haulers, massage, commercial kennels, and rental housing. Since the Edina Health Division is also responsible for code enforcement, they will use the code case feature that is also built into the Enterprise Permitting & Licensing platform to manage those cases.

Tyler’s enterprise solution broke down silos and improved communications across departments. The city’s finance, human resource, and dispatch were also using Tyler software, so this was a great opportunity to consolidate with one vendor. Brown mentioned that by utilizing Tyler’s solutions the city can “provide seamless data integration and increased productivity for the city’s various departments.”

Results

Edina’s implementation of the environmental health application benefitted the community’s safety and overall health because staff can easily ensure licenses stay up to date. “It doesn’t require manual data transfer and manipulation to get results and keep track of inspections, follow-ups, code enforcement cases, and licensing. It keeps the things we need to do right in front of us on the Hub dashboard, so it helps us stay on task,” shared Brown.

In a short period, Edina is seeing benefits. According to Brown, “Licensing has offered significant improvement for customers, thanks to Tyler’s Enterprise Environmental Health software’s ability to pay license fees online and receive license certificates via automated emails.”

Since it’s is built into Tyler’s Enterprise Permitting & Licensing platform, the city will be able to improve record keeping and communication throughout the entire code case and complaint process, creating further operational efficiencies. Having Environmental Health natively embedded into operational licensing, permitting, and renewals is essential for the optimal performance of a community like Edina.

During their implementation, there were 10 unique environmental health programs configured: Food Establishment, Residential Housing, Liquor, Pool, Lodging, Massage Establishment, Dwelling Garage, Body Art, Amusement Devices, Mobile/Temporary Food. Since going live with the new software, Edina has created or converted 1,400 operational permits belonging to over 1,190 different businesses.

The city of Edina’s future is bright as it embarks on a new era of collaborative efficiency by implementing Tyler’s built-for-thepublic sector software solutions to empower, connect, and serve its community more effectively.