Swindon Borough Council is celebrating the successful completion of another step in its digital transformation journey. The council has used RPA technology to migrate 200,000 Children’s Services records into CareDirector, a comprehensive new system. Council teams can now record and share data accurately, improving the continuity of the care plans delivered to over 230,000 residents.
By migrating legacy systems to CareDirector, the council has combined data recording, handling, and sharing for the Community Health, Mental Health, and Social Services teams. The results have included savings in staff time, improved experience for staff and service users, and better document management. Without the responsibility of monotonous rekeying, staff can spend more time on human-centric tasks, delivering valuable advice and support to Children’s Services users.
CareDirector has already begun saving time, improving data-sharing capabilities, and reducing errors – ultimately, the system is helping to deliver efficient services with resident experience and welfare in mind.
Swindon Borough Council’s previous manual system required community-facing teams to record social care data across a range of separate CapitaOne and Civica-hosted systems. This posed a number of challenges, including data-sharing issues and some informational discrepancies between teams, which led to delays.
This burden has been lifted with the help of NDL Automate. The specialised RPA product is provided by NDL, a software company specialising in public sector digital transformation.
Faced with a huge volume of data – manual extraction and migration weren’t feasible for the council. RPA Automate Bots emulate manual data input, but with much greater speed and efficiency. Automate Bots were able to migrate over 130,000 Child Services documents in a matter of days – a task that would have taken council workers weeks to manage manually.
This latest development follows the council’s use of RPA technology to improve the Free School Meals application process. Thanks to Swindon’s existing product licence for NDL Automate, they were able to migrate all records into CareDirector without added investment into further tech infrastructure.
Following the success of the Children’s Services digitisation project, Swindon Borough Council has also applied NDL’s Automate solution to its Educational Welfare and Housing systems. The replicable nature of the project means the council is able to continue its digital transformation independently, without further aid from external tech experts.
Rhian Loveless, Senior Business Analyst at Swindon Borough Council, said:
“RPA has given us the flexibility, and the opportunity, to integrate between systems earlier and cheaper – in the midst of a complex landscape of contracts ending and new system procurements. For our integration between CapitaOne and CareDirector we’ve already future proofed our solution to move to Synergy when it is implemented in March 2023. This has avoided either procuring multiple integrations at £20k at time, or a delay in the data being available to front line practitioners to carry out holistic, informed interventions – reducing the time available to work with children, young people and their families.”
