This criterion is measured by complexity (number of procedures to legally build a warehouse), the time required to complete each procedure, and the cost required.
As mentioned above, sometimes we need to dig deeper into the process to identify the big value potential of using information technology. Below you can see an example from a country’s Doing Business profile with local substeps of the “dealing with construction permits“ process.
In this case, the overall process requires 9 procedures, takes 677.0 days, and costs 57.0% of income per capita. The figures lead to the very same conclusion as in the “starting a business” process: Why don’t the town planning department and the municipality use the same set of data? Why don’t they collaborate closely – is it necessary to have two or more systems for a similar approval process? Of course the first step here is administrative – to change the chain of activities and how they are conducted. But once in place, the involved organization can share a single online application platform. Doing Business also recommends a one-stop shop for this process. The IT modules could even be reused from the one-stop shop for starting a business.
The second notable point is inspections. What if you could bring down the number of waiting days by better IT support for your inspectors, or better scheduling? A client in BENELUX opted for a booking inspections portal with the SAP Multiresource Scheduling application to make sure that resource allocation is scheduled wasting as little time as possible – making waiting time much shorter.
A public sector client in Canada introduced a mobile application for its inspectors. The result not only provided reliable access to an organization’s knowledge for its front-line employees, but it also saved commuting time, reduced paperwork, and enabled the employees to be more responsive to their clients’ needs. What again is service quality about?
One more way to improve the service quality could be benchmarking among public service organizations or even with private inspections. In Boston an open data Web site permanently measures the achievements of inspections and publishes the results.
www.cityofboston.gov/bar/scorecard/reader.htm
Next point: the subtask of updating the land title. In our example, this administrative task takes 240 days and costs €65. In a case like this with such an impact on the overall performance of the criterion, greater scrutiny of the activity is very justified. Potentially positive changes could come from a modernized and streamlined land use register. Tools to support those processes are available commercially off the shelf and are already in wide use by SAP clients worldwide.
The last point that contributes to the construction permits process is requesting and obtaining telephone/sewage/water. In this process too you can find already mentioned elements.
So why not establish a request platform – maybe integrated in a portal for investors?
Maybe the requester’s data can be shared. And of course the internal resource management would play a central role in a faster and less expensive scenario.
Appointments could be booked online by the requester. Schedules could be managed better with improved scheduling of the skilled resources responding to the request. Information required during the process could be delivered on mobile device to the field services. And last but not least, you could establish a monitoring and evaluation tool and set ambitious KPIs for the organizations to provide the named services.
If these companies are state-owned, implementing industry solutions for utilities or telecoms from SAP would be a highly recommendable step. Legions of clients around the world run these applications successfully with tremendous productivity gains.
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