licensing & permitting: streamlined solution in...

Sofbang, Technology Solutions Designed For Change

Chicago | Burr Ridge | Bogota | New Delhi

SOFBANG WHITEPAPER

PRESENTED BY: DANNY ASNANI

SOFBANG LLC

Modernizing an antiquated, paper-intensive manual process with the Oracle Cloud Platform

Sofbang White Paper sofbang.com/license

3/1/2016 Licensing & Permitting: Streamlined Solution in Oracle PaaS 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Overview ................................................................................................................................................... 2

Current Challenges .................................................................................................................................... 2

The Solution .............................................................................................................................................. 3

Accelerated Enablement ........................................................................................................................... 8

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 9

About Sofbang........................................................................................................................................... 9



OVERVIEW

Licensing and permitting is a vital line of business to all state and local public sector entities throughout the world. Whether it is a business license, driver’s license, vehicle residential permit or any other license or permit, public sector departments have mastered the process of issuing, managing and tracking licenses specific to their domain. While the current processes may be down to a science, state and local organizations continue to deal with critical challenges of having to constantly do more with less.

Organizations are looking to modernize, consolidate or retire antiquated systems that are manual, paper intensive and require redundant, repetitive data entry. This whitepaper dives deeper into the complexities associated with these challenges and provides a fresh perspective, along with best practices to streamline the licensing and permitting functions within an enterprise.

CURRENT CHALLENGES

Having worked with several public sector organizations, the challenges in the licensing and permitting domain remain fairly consistent across the board. At an enterprise level, organizations are facing a major paradigm shift in their constituent engagement model. They are pressured to reduce costs, attain higher levels of productivity, while at the same time identifying new ways to engage with their constituents. Constituents expect a simple, easy, one-stop shop streamlined experience, when purchasing their license or permit, similar to how they would purchase an item from Amazon.com. At the same time they expect a rich, engaging platform to communicate with their state, county or local municipality, along with other constituents in their community, to share experiences, feedback and be notified of happenings in real-time. Some of these challenges are further explained with the following three personas:

1. Michael, the Constituent: Michael is a Citizen of the City of Acme. He owns a restaurant and two vehicles within the city. He is applying for a business permit, which will require a minimum of two visits to City Hall to receive forms, apply and schedule for city inspectors to perform inspections prior to the incorporation of the business permit. This process is estimated to take 30 days. In addition, he has to mail-in his applications for his annual residential parking permits for his two vehicles. He puts the wrong license plate number on one of his applications, which delays the process of receiving his vehicle city stickers by four weeks, to correct the error and successfully process his application. Lastly, Michael is hosting a block party in his neighborhood. He has to download a Special Event pdf form and physically drop-off the form at City Hall. He did not do this within the 60-day window, so he is also penalized a late fee for this. Michael is a bit frustrated with these three separate touchpoints with the City of Acme. The delays in application processing, late fees and constant visits back and forth to City Hall has led to a very negative constituent experience.

2. Mary, the Executive Director: Mary is the Executive Director of the Business Affairs & Licensing Department for the City of Acme. Mary is an up and coming transformer and change agent within the city. She is tracking the increase in constituent complaints paired with the low customer satisfaction ratings. She recognizes that constituents like Michael are extremely dissatisfied with their City of Acme experience. In addition, key members of her team are leaving and/or retiring. So she is facing a brain drain of knowledge around key licensing and permitting processes and subject matter expertise leaving her department. Lastly, she is facing with ever increasing budget cuts and is forced to deliver the same service levels with lower costs.



3. John, the IT Manager: John is the IT Manager that is part of the enterprise IT team for the City of

Acme and supports all systems for the Business Affairs & Licensing Department. He is faced with several challenges specific to the licensing and permitting system. Similar to Mary, he is also seeing a brain drain in resources. The current business license application is a mainframe, flat-file based antiquated system. Business rules are hard coded and very difficult to maintain. Anytime an ordinance changes, it takes anywhere between 60-90 days to make the code change, implement, test, validate and then finally deploy the change in the application. In addition, the current application is not integration enabled. It does not integrate to core backend applications such as the ERP, GIS and CRM applications, which makes the financial (i.e. general ledger) reconciliation a very manual, time-consuming process. Lastly, John is challenged with a staff that is already at full capacity. His team is working around the clock to implement, enhance and manage current applications. Any changes to the business license application requires a significant lead time to be worked on and implemented.

After reviewing these three personas, we see that the challenges with current licensing and permitting processes and systems within organizations are common across organizations.

The current state is either a niche “one-off” software solution, an enterprise “monolithic” application, a legacy “hard-to-change” system or simply nothing in place, managing the license/permitting process on paper and file cabinets. Facing these pressures and challenges listed, public sector organizations are clearly looking for more.

THE SOLUTION

In reviewing these pain points and challenges, state and local agencies want more. They are looking to modernize antiquated systems that are manual, paper intensive and require repetitive, redundant data entry. These needs include some of the following:

- Ability to easily add/change business rules - Configure new permits and licenses - Simple, user-friendly and engaging experience - Confidential, secure yet scalable application - Integration enabled, open standards based system



- An easy, maintenance free system

Based on this and the challenges that we have come across in this space, Sofbang has built a fresh, easy-to-use, mobile centric licensing and permitting solution accelerator on the Oracle Cloud Platform. Sofbang’s Licensing & Permitting (as a Service) solution helps public sector agencies better manage their day-to-day licensing and permitting functions by streamlining and automating the experience. From simple tasks to the most complex business processes, our Oracle cloud-based solution manages and centrally connects constituents and businesses with their government, improving efficiencies and reducing human error. It helps eliminate lines at the government office counters, phone call inquiries and back-and-forth trips to City Hall. It enables citizens to submit and track the status of any permit application or request – anywhere, anytime and enables an organization to collect revenue 24/7 with a robust e-commerce, POS and backend processing engine. Our accelerator provides end to end licensing and permitting management capabilities with renewals, mobile and kiosk purchasing, along with error and data management.

This accelerator incorporates the following personas and series of use cases:

- Constituent: Buy New Permit/License, Renew Permit, Track Order, FAQs & Social, Knowledge Base, Account Management, Account Profile and Key Contact/Support

- Government Admin: Setup Permit/Licensing Details, Integrate to ERP & CRM, Order Management, Account/Customer Management, Security Setup and Adding More Permits/Types

Built on the Oracle Cloud Platform, the Sofbang Licensing and Permitting Solution Accelerator is precisely that: A Solution Accelerator and Reference Framework. It is intended to be an open middleware centric solution accelerator that can be modified or tailored specific to an organization’s needs. This means that permits/licenses and their associated workflows, business rules, data definitions and model can be crafted to the imperatives associated with the agency. In addition, as changes come along, our accelerator is flexible enough to accommodate those changes with a step-by-step process of prototyping, validating and deploying these changes in production.

The flexibility of this solution comprises of our choice of technology combined with our steel thread, agile methodology which is described in the following section. The functional architecture encompasses various modules built on the Oracle Cloud Platform.



Each module of the Sofbang Licensing & Permitting Application incorporates rich functionality for advanced business users, line of business and IT to configure and tailor their instance specific to their needs. This provides robust configuration flexibility, with guidelines and controls contained within the solution accelerator package. Each of these functional modules depicted in the diagram above map to specific roles within an agency for effective translation and alignment of business requirements, processes and integrations. For instance, a subject matter expert (SME) within an agency will prototype specific to-be processes and setup business rules based on our accelerator, using the Business Rules and Workflow Config modules. This functional architecture translates to the following product mapping and reference architecture of our Licensing & Permitting solution accelerator.



Our solution leverages three primary Oracle Cloud services:

1. Oracle Java Cloud Service 2. Oracle Process Cloud Service 3. Oracle Integration Cloud Service or SOA Cloud Service

The combination of these cloud services provide for a rich, mobile responsive user experience, which enable both constituents and government administrators with these features.

Business Rules & Workflow Config are managed and setup within the Oracle Process Cloud Service. Our solution accelerator provides a series of templates and configurations for order management, permit and license setup, account management and application processing.

Unified Mobile and Web Experience provides a rich user portal experience for conducting the series of use cases listed above for the constituent and government administrator personas. It also incorporates and exposes the workflows defined with the Oracle Process Cloud Service.

Secure PCI Payment Integration comes with out of the box integration with BluePay, a widely used PCI compliant payment processing solution. If agencies prefer to use their existing payment gateway solution, our accelerator is flexible to integrate with those as well.

Integration to CRM, ERP & Others leverages the Oracle Integration Cloud Service or SOA Cloud Service with pre-built integrations to Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Sales Cloud and other ERP and CRM SaaS based apps.



The following are screenshots of our Licensing & Permitting Solution tailored for vehicle parking permits.

These screenshots depict the government admin capabilities to configure permits, process orders, manage customers and much more:

Sofbang’s cloud-based Licensing & Permitting Solution simplifies the constituent experience, empowers the line of business within the public sector organization and reduces the burden on IT. The goal is to maintain an open, flexible platform to accelerate implementation and change as public sector needs grow and evolve over time.



ACCELERATED ENABLEMENT

Our solution approach utilizes what we call our steel thread, agile approach. We realize the public sector organizations must show immediate results and have a fast return on investment (ROI) on their initiatives. New systems and projects that take too long, fail to get completed or miss the conceived benefit. We all know as time extends, needs and priorities change. Thus, an implementation effort that takes too long to deliver will suffer from diminished stakeholder support and increased customer risk because their needs and priorities are constantly changing. Our approach to successful execution of an implementation effort is our steel thread methodology.

Starting Small and Focused

We begin by selecting one or two specific aspects of the system that have clear success factors over a short period of time as the initial focus.

We select what we believe to be repeatable or foundation components, leveraging reuse to speed the overall implementation effort.

Involve a Few Key Individuals

People are the key to the success of any project. Often too many people can deter the best planned project. We understand that public sector organizations have limited staff to dedicate to any one project. Employing this staple ensures that we make the best use of the limited time and resources.

Build a Core First

Having a solid foundation to build on is paramount for almost any activity. Our approach builds from the inside out, focusing on a steel thread, which we define as the most reusable aspect of the overall project. We then iteratively build on the initial steel thread as the implementation progresses.



Implementation Buildout

As more threads or key reusable components and knowledge are configured and/or built, the scope of application and functionality slowly expands, repeating the success found with the initial thread development.

CONCLUSION

Public sector organizations today are expected to do more with less. With budget cuts, losses in staff and constituents expecting an enhanced user experience, state and local agencies face a true shift in their operating model. Antiquated licensing and permitting applications cost a lot to maintain and are simply not agile enough to change with evolving business needs. We have addressed these challenges with Sofbang’s Licensing & Permitting Solution Accelerator built on the Oracle Cloud Platform. Benefits of our solution accelerator include:

• Anywhere, Anytime: Citizens to submit & track applications • Back Office: Staff & constituents streamline the app process • Configuration: For any license or permit • Improving: Efficiencies and reducing human error • Simplified: Mobile and integration capabilities • Cost Benefits: For your agency • The Power of Agility: Quicker ROI, More Flexibility • Maintenance Free: No staff required to support app • Enhance: Constituent Satisfaction

Within this whitepaper we address a critical need around modernizing and addressing key challenges associated with license and permitting processes for State and Local organizations. Sofbang provides a fresh perspective, along with best practices to streamline the licensing and permitting functions within an enterprise.

ABOUT SOFBANG

Founded in 2000, Sofbang is an Oracle Platinum Partner providing Oracle Fusion Middleware, Mobile & Cloud solutions to clients in the Public, Education and Utilities sectors, as well as the growing enterprise and mid-market commercial space. Sofbang specializes in providing customers with dynamic business process extensions, enterprise mobility and cloud solutions which extend, integrate and simplify enterprise business applications across an organization. We design solutions with scalability, flexibility and extendibility in mind. We call this concept Designed for Change. Our solutions help organizations reduce costs, increase revenue, enhance end-customer experience, promote accountability & transparency and improve productivity. Our company was founded with the passion that comes from seeing clients achieve strategic success.

Sofbang has received awards for developing innovative solutions and delivering outstanding value, including being awarded the prestigious Oracle Excellence Specialized Partner of the Year: Mobility Solution – North America 2015 and winner of the BPM.com and WfMC 2014 Global Award for Excellence in Business Process Management and Workflow for the Chicago Park District. Sofbang has been recognized by CIO Review as one of the 100 Most Promising Oracle Solution Providers 2015 as well 20 Most Promising Cloud Solution Providers 2015, and 20 Most Promising Campus Technology Providers of 2014.

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