City of Ryde looks to Merit

After an extensive tendering process the City of Ryde has selected Merit CRM as its customer request/relationship management system.

Merit will be used throughout the organisation to manage Council’s workload both internally and externally. Amongst the various requirements of Council, it was vital for the CRM to seamlessly integrate with Council’s corporate core systems.

The City of Ryde covers an area of around 40.651 sq km and lies in the central northern part of the Sydney Metropolitan area, approximately 12kms from the centre of Sydney.

The city occupies most of the divide between the Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers, and has 16 suburbs within its boundaries. Council has been operating a Lotus Notes based CRMS system since 1997.

It is estimated that the new system would deal with in excess of 50,000 transactions per annum and would be a core system, in delivering services to the local community. It was essential to have one customer view of all transactions including all customer requests and all other customer related information.

Roy Newsome, group manager-corporate services, City of Ryde said the CRM will give Council the ability to improve efficiencies and processes across the whole organisation.

“What impressed us with the Merit Technology’s CRM is its ability to provide one view of all customer information, the level of integration with Council’s core applications and the standard of statistical reporting were all significant factors in the decision making process,” he said.

Version 9.5 of Merit CRM will be implemented in August 2007 with a projected ‘Go Live’ date in November 2007 and will be initially integrated with existing Council enterprise applications whilst Council is undertakings a tender process for its core systems of Finance, Property, GIS and Asset system.