The Coolamon Shire Council is one of the richest agricultural and pastoral districts in the Riverina. The local government area has a population of 4,050 including the three larger towns of Coolamon, Ganmain and Ardlethan, and the smaller villages of Marrar, Matong and Beckom.
Coolamon Shire Council along with Temora Shire Council were looking for a solution that allowed them to streamline ordering of their 149 certificates over the Web. Both these councils were funded under AudIndustry's RRIF programme to find a solution.
We created and now maintain CouncilShop a tailored Web based eCommerce solution that ties into their ratings database to ensure it takes orders for the correct land parcel.
For the World CouncilShop appear to be an eCommerce solution, that looks much like a shopping cart. You run through a wizard which lets you add certificates to your shopping card and then you checkout by providing your credit cards details and delivery address.
Except for one fundamental difference, when you start a order, it asks you enter the Lot, Section identifiers so CouncilShop can ensure that you are placing an order for certificates for a land parcel that really exists in the shire.
CouncilShops is capable of integrating with most major Australian banks, streamlining payments for the Council. It also keeps the customer informed by sending them emails at various stages in the process.
As far as the council is concerned, CouncilShops is way more than meets the eye. CouncilShop is a fully fledged order management system for their certificate orders. It's able to manage the lifecycle of the order, track which parts of the order is complete and finally send a message to the customer with their PDF certificates.
The backend was so successful that its now used for over the counter orders and has completely replaced the paper based ordering system. At the end of the month its able to produce reports in formats that the Council's accounting system can import simplifying the reconciliation process.
CouncilShops is delivered as a Software as a Service. We run the entire system from a dedicated virtual machine located in our enterprise grade data centre.