Sea Girt, New Jersey recently learned that the best way to stay up to code is by ensuring its software is up to snuff!
Challenge
The Code Enforcement department’s role is to make sure that community issues are reported and resolved, but several elements of Sea Girt’s violation management process made this quite difficult. For starters, constituents would report concerns by placing a phone call or paying a visit to city hall. Inconvenient reporting options means that many code violations likely fell through the cracks. Those violations that were reported were resolved through a paper-based process in which inspection data was jotted in a notebook in the field and notices were typed, printed and mailed to offenders. Paper documents were sometimes misplaced, and Sea Girt employees regularly spent 15% of their day asking other departments for information and communicating status updates to complainants.
Solution
Sea Girt deployed GovPilot’s Code Enforcement module and never looked back. GovPilot’s digital Report a Concern form sits on Sea Girt’s official website and the GovAlert app sits on users’ smartphones, enabling constituents to alert employees to possible violations, and non-emergency concerns at their convenience. A custom, automated workflow streamlines the scheduling of inspections, the retrieval of data and the communication of status updates, empowering Sea Girt officials to “properly track and enforce a code violation” in half the time it used to take.
Results
66%
Drop in time spent communicating with requestors/other departments (15% to 5%)
65%
Drop in time spent on phone calls (Reduced from 10 mins to 3.5 mins)
2X
Increased efficiency (Cut tracking time by 50%)
Fewer Calls
Status inquiry phone calls (Frequency of calls dropped significantly)
"Previously, there was no tracking of what came in, what went out, regarding code violations. Utilizing GovPilot, we can easily see trends with violations, plot them by geographic area and see common violators. We can also notify Borough residents of violation trends and get ahead of them."
