As part of our Highways Project, we have been looking at how we can improve the User Experience for Highway Licence applications while at the same time reducing the number of steps and time taken to process an application by the Highways team.
Focusing on the Dropped Kerbs licence application as an initial test of our assumptions, we were able to replace the existing PDF application route with a dedicated web form. Doing this alone helped to shave several minutes off the back-office process by eliminating duplication by the admin staff.
Under the existing process, applicants paid for their licence only when prompted to by the Highways admin team. Putting the payment at the point of submission eliminated the manual prompt for payment and helped to improve the overall applicant experience, while at the same time removing the need to duplicate data in a centralised spreadsheet for reconciliation purposes. This resulted in a significant time saving for both the applicant and the admin team, making the overall process faster and more joined up for all parties.
Working with the IT development team, we were able to create and develop processes that allowed for faster allocation of applications to relevant highways staff and automated issuing of decisions via PDFs directly from the back-office system to the applicant. Doing this allowed us to remove the need for updating the licence manually – effectively removing further duplication in the process and saving yet more time in the handling of the application.
We timed the existing Dropped Kerb process and this came to approximately 30 minutes per application. Most of this time was spent duplicating information from the application into emails, spreadsheets and word documents. In eliminating all duplication we have managed to reduce the administration time from 30 minutes per application to 5 minutes.
This is a significant saving, especially when considered as a proof of concept that can be repeated across the remaining applications.
Read more detail on the Highways Services Discovery project.
