SNAP! Building Control Helps Streamline Partnership

• Streamlining East & South Cheshire Partnership
• Enabling Electronic Submit-a-Plan Applications
• Multi Office & Home Working
• Online Solution
• Increasing Customer Service

Introduction

East & South Cheshire Building Control partnership is responsible for the Building Control departments of Macclesfield, Congleton and Crewe & Nantwich. The formation of the service brought about a need to increase efficiencies and customer service levels.

The formation of the partnership however created many new issues that needed to be overcome. One of these issues being how to enable Building Regulation applications to be deposited and distributed amongst its inspectors that were located across the head office, satellite offices, and from home without adding time to the process.

East & South Cheshire Building Control could see that embracing new online methods of working as the way forward providing greater flexibility for staff working in multiple locations. Online working would help speed up the approval process by enabling applications to be instantly available to all.

SNAP! Building Control

To meet the partnership needs Resolution set East & South Cheshire up with a new online SNAP! account.

Using SNAP! East & South Cheshire Building Control are able to view, measure, print and download applications made on the LABC Submit-a-Plan National website. Because SNAP! is web hosted no in house software installation or the provision of expensive servers were required. Inspectors are able to simply access applications from anywhere and at any time that have been submitted using SNAP!.

Using SNAP! not only did East and South Cheshire Building Control have the ideal solution for receiving electronic applications but applicants were also able to benefit from new functionality, which included adding revisions.

East & South Cheshire Building Control

“The East & South Cheshire Building Control Partnership focus is to deliver a high quality service to our customers and provide value for money.

The partnership needs to embrace new methods of working to achieve its goal of flexible online working by making the most of new technology. We need to be flexible to deliver services from the central office in Sandbach, satellite offices, and from surveyors working remotely via the internet

The move to SNAP! gives the Partnership the flexibility it needs. As SNAP! is web hosted it has created a robust submissions tool for online applications that can be relied upon as a contingency against any local ICT service failing and bridged the gap between the member authorities.

The inclusion of SNAP! has provided confidence to encourage our customers to submit electronically rather than the traditional paper method.

Numbers of online applications have increased recently and we expect them to continue to rise. With SNAP! we are positioned to embrace online applications and provide our customers with an online service.

We are trying to achieve a complete paperless environment and at present staff are provided with laptops and additional screens for home working. The next step for the partnership is to look at enabling the online application consultation module for SNAP!”

Ian Bunn, Head of Building Control.

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