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Department of Juvenile Justice Improves Upgrade Rollout Process
Customer Profile
Operating within a 300,000 square mile territory in Australia, the New South Wales Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) has eight detention centers and sixty offices across the state. The Department helps young people between 10 and 18 years of age who have committed criminal offences to choose positive alternatives to offending behavior. DJJ serves hundreds of young offenders in custody and works with thousands of others through community-based activities each year.
The Challenge: New System Implementation Training
In September 2004, DJJ upgraded from Mincom’s MIMS enterprise resource planning system to the software provider’s Ellipse platform. The Department had already conducted significant business process reengineering using MIMS. After experiencing acceptance issues during previous upgrades, DJJ was determined to provide effective support for users following the Ellipse implementation.
“When we implemented MIMS in 1999, one of the big lessons we learned was that we really didn’t have a good training manual or methodology,” said Matthew Smith, Finance and Business Administrator at DJJ. “Second time round we decided it was important to implement this. We have 60-odd offices across the whole state, from Broken Hill to Tweed Heads and Bega, so face-to-face training simply wasn’t an option. We needed a tool to provide easy training to staff in remote areas.”
The Solution: SupportPoint
DJJ discussed their needs with another MIMS user, The NSW Department of Commerce, who had implemented SupportPoint for MIMS with positive results. SupportPoint is a performance support system that delivers relevant and actionable information about an organization’s specific systems, processes, policies, tasks, and products. With SupportPoint, employees know the right way to work – first time and every time.
SupportPoint improves operational effectiveness by helping employees use systems and apply processes correctly. This ensures higher returns on investment in new systems, greater compliance with policies and procedures, and less rework resulting from confusion about how work is supposed to be done.
The Results: Improved Adoption of New System
Despite the fact that many users were not fully computer literate, DJJ increased the new system acceptance by using SupportPoint as the online support for Ellipse. It provided an excellent and easy way of providing users with information about standardized business processes and procedures.
“Acceptance of the new system has been excellent,” said Smith. “Users walked away and could say, ‘I’m not too flash on these systems, but with SupportPoint taking me through it I’m confident I’ll be able to do it’. It really is a useful tool.”
The Results: Effective Knowledge Support for Remote Staff
With so many offices in such widespread locations across the state, DJJ has been impressed by the ease with which knowledge can be delivered, regardless of a user’s location.
“The development and introduction of new procedures in DJJ has always been difficult because of the distances involved,” said Smith. “SupportPoint has made that game a whole lot easier by overcoming the vastness of the areas we have to cover and the difficulties of communicating with so many people.”
SupportPoint’s effectiveness has been highlighted by the reduction in helpdesk calls experienced by DJJ’s IT department. “Traditionally, people just got on the phone and asked for help,” said Smith. “Now they pull up SupportPoint, refresh their memory and don’t need to call. We have noticed a significant decrease in helpdesk calls related to our requisitioning system.”
Future Plans: Expanded Usage for Compliance
DJJ has been so pleased by SupportPoint’s functionality as an online knowledge management system that it plans to expand its use to include other areas in support of learning and compliance. “
DJJ staff have to be aware of certain policies and procedures in areas such as Occupational Health and Safety and our Code of Conduct,” said Smith. “Currently these training modules are all paper-based. We are planning to move this process into SupportPoint so that staff can complete training online. SupportPoint will then connect to Ellipse and advise management on which staff members have completed each module.”
“We’re really only a fraction of the way through what we want to do with SupportPoint,” said Smith. “We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re very happy with what’s been achieved so far. The potential of a system like this is just enormous."
Panviva: Developers of SupportPoint
Panviva’s performance support system, SupportPoint, is a knowledge base solution that provides fast, targeted access to structured documentation about systems, processes, and products. SupportPoint improves adoption of applications and processes, while reducing training and support costs.
Organizations with complex processes and systems use SupportPoint to offer self-service support that builds know-how at the moment-of-need. SupportPoint delivers structured, up to date, and personalized content that gives users rapid access to just the information they need to complete the task correctly. Globally, more than 50,000 users rely on SupportPoint across a broad range of industries to reduce processing errors, strengthen compliance, and increases customer service levels.
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