Missouri City Reduces Office Visits With Online Operations
Organization Profile
- Industry: Municipal
- Location: Raytown, Missouri
- Number of Employees: 125
- Population: 30,012
- Tyler Client Since: 1997
- Tyler Products/Solutions: Enterprise Permitting & Licensing, ERP Pro
Located 10 miles southeast of Kansas City, the city of Raytown, Missouri, is home to more than 30,000 residents. To better serve them, the city sought ways to streamline inspections and modernize their back office, including how they handled fees, notifications, automations, and workflows. Raytown also wanted to make the permitting process more accessible and equipped to handle the nuances of rental permitting and regulations.
Raytown sought to:
- Better serve community members: Many processes were still paper-based, requiring community members to travel to city hall to file permits and place phone calls to track status.
- Free up office space: Permits and associated files were then kept on-premises in filing cabinets, taking up valuable office space.
- Optimize staff time: Staff hours posed a challenge, with the preparation of physical mail for business licenses and renewals taking up a significant portion of staff time, in addition to the time already taken up by residents making physical office visits and phone calls for updates on the status of their permits.
- Save on postage: The cost of postage also represented a fiscal concern due to rising rates.
As an existing Tyler client, it was natural for Raytown to adopt Tyler’s Enterprise Permitting & Licensing solution to meet their streamlining and modernization goals.
Solution
Raytown started their Enterprise Permitting & Licensing launch by digitizing files and the permit application process, which enabled the city to retire physical filing cabinets and free up office space for its staff.
Through use of Enterprise Permitting & Licensing’s Civic Access portal, residents, contractors, and business professionals were able to begin filing applications online, reducing physical office visits. Civic Access also enabled community members to track the status of their permits online, reducing office visits and phone calls.
“Our main pain points to solve were paper reduction and giving our customers the ability to submit online applications,” said April Mayne, a Raytown permit technician.
In addition to Civic Access, Raytown also leveraged Tyler’s mobile applications, including Inspections Mobile, to improve their inspections processes by using tablets for digital recordkeeping, enabling inspectors to work from the field and not return to city hall to turn in paperwork.
“Inspections Mobile has optimized and streamlined our inspections,” Mayne said. “Utilizing our electronic tablets to perform inspections, list out compliance items, complete, and notify contacts on the record has simplified our inspections and made them easier to organize and track without having to pull a physical file.”
Tyler’s professional services teams also assisted Raytown in the configuration of the software to suit the city’s processes while streamlining their workflows through automation.
“Tyler has helped us with innovation,” Mayne said. “It has helped us automate emails and track tickets for any solutions we needed to be able to fix issues on almost a daily basis. They not only assisted us with being able to modernize and update our processes, but the team has been beneficial to our office as we push forward into new technology to better service the public.”
Tyler has helped us with innovation,” Mayne said. “It has helped us automate emails and track tickets for any solutions we needed to be able to fix issues on almost a daily basis. They not only assisted us with being able to modernize and update our processes, but the team has been beneficial to our office as we push forward into new technology to better service the public.
April Mayne
Permit Technician, Raytown, MO
Results
“Tyler’s Implementation team assisted our office with automations and notifications to effectively move business license renewals to an email form, saving us money on envelopes, paper, and stamps, as well as staff time to stuff license renewals into envelopes and mail them out to customers,” Mayne said.
Since implementing Enterprise Permitting & Licensing, Raytown has seen:
- A 60% reduction in postage fees, despite annual increases in postage cost
- An 85% reduction in office visits, freeing up staff time and reducing the number of cars on the road for a reduction in pollution and increase in available parking
“I think the community in general just feels nicer when it’s less busy, fewer people in and out of the office,” Mayne said.
With their office traffic reduced and 85% of payments being made online, Raytown is now looking to further improve online resident services through the application process.
“We are pushing to allow our customers a better online experience when they apply online,” Mayne said.