The Customer
Mission Australia is a national charity that has been helping vulnerable Australians move towards independence for 160 years. Their goal is to reduce homelessness and strengthen communities across Australia. Mission Australia’s integrated nationwide services help people find safe and affordable housing, support disadvantaged children and families, empower troubled young people, assist people with mental illness and disability, and much more.
The Challenge
With more than 2,500 staff and more than 1,500 volunteers in Australia, dispersed across major cities to remote outback towns, Mission Australia found themselves with a challenge to understand where their workers were under usual circumstances, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they found an even greater challenge. With such a geographically remote workforce, Mission Australia needed a rapid solution to gain visibility over where their people were working. The requirement was first and foremost to ensure the safety of their team. There were two elements to this; understanding who was interacting with who in case of infection and meeting the compliance requirements of their workers compensation insurance policy to ensure their people were covered in case of an incident.
Rolling out a national solution seemed like a complex project, and the original plan involved manual survey and reports – which Mission Australia knew would be incredibly time consuming, prone to data entry errors and provide delayed results. Mission Australia engaged AC3 to leverage their existing ServiceNow instance to deliver a digital solution.
The Solution
AC3 worked closely with Mission Australia to deliver the brand new Emergency Self Report application that ServiceNow released to help organisations manage their workforce during the pandemic. A pure ‘out of the box’ solution wasn’t going to be fit for purpose for Mission Australia, who knew they needed some customisation. We customised the application to allow employees to report their location rather than their health status. Taking all the guesswork out of the equation for managers, the app allows them to view the working location and status of their entire team. They can simply click to reassign tasks, as well as set automatic reminders for when an employee is due back to work. The solution also included dashboard reporting through Performance Analytics and a set of pre-built reports, so Mission Australia can see the current status of their workforce in real time, at the click of a button. In addition, we built a custom audit trail report to give a full view of historical data.
The new app was launched as part of the relaunch of Mission Australia’s service portal. The AC3 team worked with Mission Australia engineers to educate and enable them to launch the new portal within 48 hours!
The Results
After a seamless launch of the application, Mission Australia have found the portal incredibly useful. Not only do their people now have access to a new service portal and can easily report their working location, but we have saved their Crisis Management Team hours and hours of manual labour and data entry. The real time data allows them to care for their people and enables them to make decisions.
Speaking on his experience with AC3, Peter Smith, CIO of Mission Australia said that “Working with the AC3 team was really easy. They demonstrated their flexibility and responsiveness incredibly well with ServiceNow, which was impressive, and we were very appreciative of this – especially in a crisis.
“We had the added bonus of getting our new service portal up and running. With the help of the team, we had it up and running virtually overnight. Their expertise and advice has enabled us to get the platform in place to continually add new features and leverage the value of our existing platforms.”