Aberdeen City Council
Transforming Social Care for Aberdeen City Council’s 230,000 citizens
The Customer
Aberdeen City is home to almost 230,000 people and 123,000 households, with the council handling over 20,000 cases at any given time across a workforce of 8000.
Aberdeen City Council has the vision and drive to become an ambitious, achieving, smart city. Part of that continual journey focused on efforts within the Social Care space. Aberdeen wanted to bring adult and children’s social care data and workflows together in one place, where staff will be able to record, share and analyse information with greater ease, supported by automation. Developing this capability is key to ensuring public services are built around the needs and strengths of individuals, families and communities.
The Challenge
As the number of cases handled within the department increases in complexity and in volume, stemming both from pressures arising from societal changes and the pandemic, Aberdeen’s desire to continue to offer the best social care provision possible has never been more important. In order to do that, Aberdeen wanted to implement a solution capable of allowing them to optimise processes and maximise data capture to drive better reporting and insight. At the same time, they wanted to provide staff with an easy-to-use tool whilst embedding consistent processes and removing manually intensive processes, all of which lead to reduced errors, safeguard data and improve service delivery.
An ageing social care system in need of a vital upgrade provided the opportunity to review the options available. The Council decided that given their significant investment in the Microsoft technology stack as part of their council transformation programme, extending this array of capabilities would provide a platform suitable to introduce immediate value whilst in the future allowing other services and users across the council to use the same platform, transforming public services.
The Solution
As one of Microsoft’s preferred partners, Hitachi Solutions have worked with Aberdeen City Council to create a robust and secure solution to input and store client information in one place using Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, reducing the numerous places where work was previously conducted. Staff now use a simplified and consistent approach to conducting client assessments, reviews and referrals. Using a unified set of tools, gives staff a 360-degree view of the individual and their support network utilising Power Platform and Azure Cloud services for infrastructure and integration to additional data sources. Power BI visualisations and data analytics further allow employees to understand and interpret the necessary information with ease, reducing manual reporting processes, putting the information at the fingertips of those who need it.
Hitachi Solutions bring the innovation, space and expertise needed to deliver digital transformation at a pace that is needed.
Andy MacDonald
Director of Customer Services
The Future
Aberdeen City Council hopes in the future to continue to modernise their current legacy applications used to support council services, by reducing the reliance on the number of inflexible systems in place. Using a simplified set of technologies and tools, whilst harnessing the more innovative components Microsoft’s Azure Cloud offers, will further eradicate or reduce manual processes, allowing better decision making by being more informed by better use of Data analytics, and ultimately continue to improve customer outcomes