Digitizing reporting saves time and money

This provincial government of Canada public sector entity protects workers’ rights by regulating workplaces and ensuring labor legislation is fair and modern. It also works to ensure that the local area has a skilled workforce and an efficient labor market to support a thriving and diverse economy.

This provincial government of Canada’s previous reporting environment relied heavily
on paper forms and discrete PDFs, which staff, citizens and businesses accessed
across multiple systems, making it time-consuming and prone to human error.
Instead, it wanted to digitize business processes, reduce manual effort and centralize
data collection to provide consolidated self-service reporting and statistical analysis.

The challenge in creating one consolidated reporting platform is to bring together
the data from all these disparate systems. The ministry wanted to build one unified
backend which connects to eight different external-facing portals for different
departments, including employment standards and occupational health and safety.
It then turned to long-term strategic partner Fujitsu, which already provided
application support and maintenance, for advice.

Fujitsu provided the architecture and technical oversight, along with business analysis and development resources to ensure the smooth deployment of the ambitious data portals project, built on Microsoft Dynamics. Fujitsu also integrated Master Data Management tools and created a centralized data mart for self-service ad-hoc reporting and extensive data analysis. This allows for robust data sharing between business areas, reporting on employers who are not in good standing for putting action items in place and potential fraud detection.

The team’s extensive knowledge of the tools and technologies allowed for seamless integration with the wider government’s enterprise services, which enables the solution to both fit into the provincial government’s digital shift strategy and meet its specific business outcomes.

The solution also integrates with government services, such as user authentication and authorization (single sign-on for citizens), business authentication (single sign-on and user management for businesses), electronic payment services and integration with central financial systems. This makes for a seamless user experience for over 400 internal users and countless business and citizen users. The solution realigns citizen-centered service delivery outcomes, transforming focused on serving as opposed to governing.

The result is a robust, flexible and highly available range of portals, which provide a single window into government with critical access to ministry services for citizens and businesses across the province. Across the eight portals, there are now almost 50,000 transactions annually, ranging from anonymous tips about employer standards to complaints in health and safety. By reducing the need for human intervention, the portal solution has saved over 3,600 hours of effort annually – equivalent to CA$300K in savings. Meanwhile, this digital shift is making citizens’ lives simpler and safer, with a reduction in fraud, and faster, more transparent submissions.

At the same time, the new Fujitsu solution reduces data entry duplication across portals, enhances data analytics for smarter decision-making and provides visibility of whether employers are meeting key standard and safety regulations.

This example of centralized, consolidated data collection with self-service reporting and statistical analysis has proven so successful that it received an award for service delivery innovation. The award demonstrates that true digital transformation projects, particularly in the public sector arena, don’t have to incorporate new technologies, such as blockchain and AI, to be effective and noteworthy.

However, Fujitsu and this public sector entity are not resting on their laurels; as well as providing ongoing support, Fujitsu will continue to improve the portals and build further functionality, ensuring they remain integral whilst also reducing costs, saving time and improving outcomes for citizens.