Background

Regulating for a quality built environment in Victoria, the Victorian Building Authority (VBA) regulates building and plumbing practitioners to ensure the achievement of efficient and competitive building and plumbing industries in Victoria.

The Problem

Brooke partnered with VBA to design and deliver the new Building Activity Management Systems (BAMS) permit system, leveraging the Salesforce and MuleSoft platforms. The key objective for BAMS was to offer a new digital experience for the lodgement of permits with a real-time, online transaction capability and payment capability.

Methodology (Thinking Differently)

VBA needed their solution built quickly due to the changes in legislation. As the organisation that would now control building permit numbers [where traditionally building surveyors had responsibility for this task], wide-ranging stakeholder engagement was key to a successful outcome.

Brooke partnered with VBA to understand what was required from the process and therefore the system and understand the differences from the previous process to the new one. Industry engagement was critical to understand their needs, with state-based engagement/Q&A sessions undertaken with surveyors. Key to success was to bring the VBA along for this part of the process at a point when they were ready to do so.

Brooke took a human centred design approach to the solution, mapping out personas of those people who would ultimately use the system to determine how it would best work for them.

Personas ranged from small ‘mum and dad’ operated businesses to large scale companies to
ensure all potential users were considered in the solution.

Meaningful Results

Key outcomes achieved include:

• Reduction in application processing time due to all applications being brought online
• Improved data quality from online submission
• Elimination of large volumes of manual work arounds including scanning and saving documents now consolidated into a document management system using applicant provided documents
• Automated payment processing and reconciliation when previously cash and cheques were accepted and manually deposited at the bank.

Salesforce Products

• Service Cloud (VBA Staff Portal)
• Community Cloud (Building Surveyor Portal)

MuleSoft Integrations (API)

• Address Validation (Experian)
• Payment Gateway (Westpac)
• Automating records management (TRIM)