City of Winston-Salem, NC

The City of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has been named to a list of the top 10 digital cities by the Center for Digital Government. The City tied for 10th among cities with a population of 125,000 to 250,000 on the center´s 2002 Digital Cities Survey. The award reflects the City´ concerted effort to move toward "E-government."

Early on, the city government recognized their existing legacy business systems would not support the level of service they wanted to offer their citizens. They developed a strategy to select business applications that could be tightly integrated. H. P. Higgins, the City´s Assistant Revenue Collector, explained how they chose RevenueCollector to replace their existing payment collection applications:

Streamlined System Solutions

"Particularly with the revenue division, where we have many diverse types of activities, we had several different backend systems. We insisted on having one centralized collection system with appropriate financial controls that could pull all of those systems together." H. P. added, "We wanted to provide one stop where customers could pay any type of bill while dealing with only one person."

"What helped us choose RevenueCollector was its ease of use, its broadly installed customer base and its pricing structure. To improve cash management, we envision rolling RevenueCollector out to all the City´s cash collection functions, including remote locations like parking decks and recreation centers. Having a pricing structure based on the number of transactions processed instead of concurrent users makes that financially possible," H. P. said.

H. P. noted several advantages gained from implementing RevenueCollector at the City´s revenue division. "We´ve significantly reduced our investment in training. Instead of having to learn four or five screens, cashiers only have to learn one." H. P. reported, "When we bring someone in they feel comfortable the second day instead of the second week. That allows us to do a lot more cross training among our staff because you don´t have to make that big training investment. We can provide better customer service because we can more easily move people to where the demand is at that time."

Features for Faster Processing

The city is processing payments faster. H. P. indicated, "Before RevenueCollector, cashiers had to go to a backend system, do a lookup there, print that out, then come back to the cashiering system and reenter that information. The pre-inquiry and inquiry functionality of RevenueCollector brings that information right to the cashier. Receipt validation and printing functions are also much quicker than before."

The query and reporting features of RevenueCollector have sped payment research and eliminated several steps in the process. H. P. recalled, "We used to have to print and file paper reports. Now we don´t worry about saving those because we can go back and do a query across that period and get the information we need." He also noted that the journal feature saves cashiers a lot of time balancing their deposits.

Finally, H. P. indicated RevenueCollector has reduced their reliance on services outside their division. "The system is much more user supportable. We can maintain and change configurations on our own without IS intervention," he said.

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