How the New South Wales Government Delivers Drought Aid Faster with Intelligent Automation

Logos of NSW Government and FlowBuilders

This is Part Two of our series with FlowBuilders, an Australian Workato partner. For Part One on intelligently routing citizen complaints via multiple instances of Salesforce, click here.

New South Wales (NSW) is Australia’s largest state and home to more than 7.9 million people with the city of Sydney as its capital. The NSW state government is made up of several different departments and agencies that carry out the activities of government. 

One of Workato’s Australian partners, FlowBuilders, helps these departments and agencies make Salesforce-based processes faster and less labor-intensive. Recently, these included streamlining the process to administer assistance measures to the rural sector, as well as small businesses that have suffered loss or damage due to natural disasters.

Apps

Challenges

The government needed to process thousands of applications for drought aid in a matter of days.

Impact

Faster drought aid delivered to farmers by streamlining the aid application process with automations.


Drought, bushfires, and more recently COVID-19 have placed a major financial strain on farmers and agricultural businesses. To help these businesses, NSW needed to quickly and efficiently distribute financial aid in the form of grants, loans, and subsidies. 

“Many of our farmers are having a hard time coping with today’s events, financially,” Robi George, FlowBuilder’s co-founder and Director of Consulting says.

“When subsidies, loans, and grants programs are made available to farmers who are struggling with these events, it’s important for agencies to be able to quickly process and assess applications, to get the funding where it is needed.”

Slow, Manual Processing of Aid Applications No Longer Adequate

Previously, aid applications were submitted by email, paper or via fax, and could take up to several weeks to process manually. But with thousands of farmers in need of immediate assistance, this approach was unscalable and no longer adequate. 

The solution needed to be built quickly and had to be much more efficient.

“FlowBuilders had to set up a digital version of the process very quickly—over a single weekend initially,” George recalls.

The process begins when a farmer submits an application via a web form. These applications are routed into Salesforce, where a new case is created. This triggers several recipes on Workato, to:

  • Monitor Master Accounts and Contacts to de-duplicate and create a single view of the customer;
  • Check applications against eligibility rules;
  • Create Accounts and Contracts in SAP; and
  • Send all Case file attachments into a document management system called CM9. 
A diagram of the automated workflow from application for drought aid to it being recorded as a case.

This automated workflow is made possible by Workato’s library of connectors, which allows FlowBuilders to quickly connect the platforms that were already in use by the agency without having to build any from scratch. 

With this workflow in place, the agency was able to process far more applications more quickly, so they could provide aid to those in need much faster.

The agency could also monitor and track applications via real-time dashboards and reports. 

“The agency received thousands of applications within the first two weeks after the aid was announced,” said George.

“Leveraging on the speed and convenience of integrating Salesforce and CM9 with Workato truly helped enable faster responses to these applications and disburse financial aid to those affected more quickly.”
Robi George Co-Founder and Director of Consulting at FlowBuilders

Using Workato, FlowBuilders orchestrated multiple innovative workflows across systems used by NSW Government agencies that are designed to reduce errors (which led to delays) and eliminate tedious manual work.

For the NSW Government, this means enhanced data accuracy, response speed and agility when it comes to serving the people of NSW!

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