Since its introduction in 2007, the City of Cape Town’s C3 Notification system has enabled the City to better manage and resolve residents’ complaints and has empowered councillors by enabling them to log and track issues in their wards.

The success of the system was acknowledged when the City received a prestigious award at the Africa SAP User Group (AFSUG) conference in Johannesburg.

The C3 system is an internal process that is used to record, track and report complaints and requests from residents and ratepayers. It is applied to all functions of work in the City, from potholes, water leaks, power outages and muggings, to employee pay queries or internal maintenance requests.

When residents phone the City’s centralised Call Centre (0860 103 089), a notification is created on the C3 system. All possible types of complaints for the various different City Departments have been catalogued, which provides a quick and easy way for Call Centre staff to classify the issue and to direct the complaint through the correct channels. The complainant is then given a reference number, which allows him or her to follow up on the complaint. The notification will be closed as soon as the complaint has been dealt with. This enables the City to measure how long it took to deal with complaints, as an indicator of service delivery success and improvement over time.

“The primary goal of a Local Government is service delivery, and failure to deliver services results in failure to achieve overall goals. There has never before been any business process that informs and quantifies service delivery in a Local Government and through this project, the City of Cape Town has been the first to formalise a business process, as well as implement and show results from the process,” said Andre Stelzner, the City’s Director: Information Systems and Technology.

Stelzner said the C3 Notification system is also unique in that it is integrated with the City’s GIS systems. “In a large local authority, it is essential to be able to view, report on and analyse almost all data spatially. It is invaluable to be able to see a picture of, for example, sewer blockages in a suburb or catchment. The pattern on a map is far easier to analyse than a table of data. The use of GIS is considered innovative, unique and best practice.”

The Africa SAP User Group (AFSUG) conference is the flagship SAP event in Southern Africa and attracts more than 2000 national and international delegates from the entire SAP community (clients, consultants, SAP Germany, partners etc.) who use it to showcase their technologies and best practices.

At the conference, Impact Awards are awarded to companies and the public sector where their business improvement or implementation project is considered to have been a leading example of excellence in what can be achieved. The City received an Impact Award for Innovation in the Public Sector at the conference.