Software AG to improve municipal service delivery though Aflent Business Solutions Partnership

Enterprise software company Software AG has partnered with Aflent Business Solutions (ABS) to deliver the Smart City Solution (SCS) that will help improve service delivery in all municipalities.

According to Coley Zephenia, Chief Executive at ABS: “SCS offers a multidimensional digital transformation capability for municipalities of different sizes. To effectively achieve this, the solution consists of a government-wide enterprise architect (GWEA) compliant architecture and contains standardised end-to-end municipal processes.”

SCS provides municipalities with a solid foundation for embarking on successful automation journeys, managing compliance and any other municipal business requirements.”

Like many thought leaders and municipal subject matter experts, he believes that SCS has excellent capabilities that can enable municipalities to transform into citizen-centric, process-driven and technology-enabled smart cities.

SCS is a versatile and structured platform to conquer the information chaos in municipalities, service delivery and other key challenges (unclean audits, low quality of financial statements, irregular expenditure, non-compliance to legislation, and poor performance).

He further emphasises: “Although SCS is robust and platform agnostic, it has been deployed on Software AG’s world-leading suite of technologies. This makes this combination of a thought leadership-based solution a great choice for municipalities.”

The SCS approach enabled by Software AG technologies has been applied at one of the major metros in Gauteng in its digital transformation journey in the past few years.

Itayi Mandonga, Chief Technology Officer, Software AG, says: “The SCS is a robust solution that will allow municipalities to standardise and optimise processes through best practice design and improve service delivery by monitoring and optimising citizen-facing processes.”

The solutions will help address some of the key challenges faced by municipalities. These challenges include:

• Lack of value-adding reporting for sound decision-making;
• Unsatisfactory service delivery due to unaccountable business practices;
• A disconnect with citizens by not having transparent and responsive communication platforms;
• Qualified audits due to defragmented processes and failure to comply with best practice and legislation; and
• Difficulties in holistically managing performance of the municipality due to lack of structured reporting and information systems integration.

“The platform is structured enough to overcome the information disorder in municipalities that have historically caused the lack of service delivery in some of the municipalities. This will ultimately benefit service delivery efforts and help to provide clean audits,” says Mandonga.

He adds that municipalities have been faced with many challenges over the years so it is important to find solutions that help us overcome these challenges through sustainable and innovative means. “With this solution, we will be able to solve the disconnection issue that citizens face by offering a transparent and responsive communication platform. This will ultimately make it easier to holistically manage municipal performance through structured reporting and information systems integration.”

With the SCS, Software AG will be able to help different departments within the municipality such as the municipal manager, COO of service delivery as well as the ICT head of department, to name a few. “Our main goal with the solution is to ensure that the key stakeholders in these businesses are targeted to be able to implement marketing strategies through various channels,” concludes Mandonga.