Holy Makkah Municipality Introduces Integrated Multichannel Platform, Automates Services, and Meets Digital Collaboration Needs
 
 

Holy Makkah Municipality Introduces Integrated Multichannel Platform, Automates Services, and Meets Digital Collaboration Needs

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Holy Makkah Municipality (HMM) is a government organization of Saudi Arabia. In response to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s project, known as the National Plan for Information Technology and e-Government, HMM acted on a strategic plan to deploy an information technology infrastructure, aligned with a customer-oriented business model for more efficiency and transparency. HMM plans to also enhance employee productivity while reducing time spent on administrative tasks and overall operating costs.

The organization runs more than 30 business applications that address the needs of major municipal operations and services, such as issuing licenses for construction and professionals, and managing the municipality’s financial, human resources, and payroll processes. However, its legacy systems had limited integration, driving the need to transform and deliver most municipal services as e-services. HMM wanted to use the latest technologies and focus on best practices and methodologies, such as those developed for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), business process modeling (BPM), and program management organization (PMO).

Holy Makkah Municipality established a multichannel platform, based on Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 8.1 and other Oracle products to automate processes, ensure digital collaboration with engineering offices, and enhance the quality of the services it delivers to professionals and the public. HMM also integrated Siebel with the geographical information system developed by Oracle Partner Omnix International, which produces geographical information on top of a map of the Makkah region to complement discrete reports and substantially enhance HMM’s analytical capabilities.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Holy Makkah Municipality

  • “Oracle’s open architecture and many operating system options provide Holy Makkah Municipality with unmatched benefits from best-of-breed products in every layer of the stack, enabling us to build the best infrastructure for our enterprise. Siebel CRM helps us to manage all customer-facing operations through a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features. Oracle’s solutions were simply the best fit for our needs, compared to other e-services platforms on the market.” – Dr. Ibrahim Abdullah, IT Director, Holy Makkah Municipality

  • Establish a robust platform to implement various e-services processes—such as building, retail, and construction permits—eliminating the municipality’s reliance on scattered legacy systems for different departments and services
  • Enhance operational efficiency by replacing manual procedures with automated business processes
  • Integrate e-mail, short message service (SMS), intelligent voice response (IVR), and call center channels, in addition to the field service channel, to cover future municipal field inspection requirements, such as ensuring compliance with regulations

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle’s Siebel Public Sector eService to establish an integrated, multichannel platform to manage end-to-end requirements—automating services for 230 engineering offices and the public—and delivering excellent service to clients and more than 50,000 internal and external system users
  • Automated and integrated business processes to enhance service delivery and optimize municipal operations monitoring, making workflows more transparent and avoiding bottlenecks and delays
  • Used call center tools and solutions provided by Siebel CRM to easily access all information related to clients and services provided to them, such as building permits and citizen complaints
  • Helped to better manage clients and transactions by unifying profiles for citizens, companies, and land entities to include transactional data and other information in a single interface
  • Introduced Oracle’s AutoVue 2D Professional and AutoVue 3D Professional Advanced to deliver visual access to construction and building permit documents and drawings, meeting digital collaboration needs between engineering offices and other municipal departments, as well as streamlining the electronic permit processes
  • Used Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g to steer the entire municipal operation toward integrated and easy-to-use dashboards, including key performance indicators and alerts for events, such as case completion times and delays in processing specific service types
  • Established a centralized archiving and correspondence system, based on Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, to help all employees and departments execute daily transactions—internally between departments and with third parties
  • Used Oracle Universal Content Management to enable users to check in and view documents from within the same application—including all documents needed to process or apply for a specific service, making them available online for easier retrieval
  • Made the municipality’s entire service portfolio available via a self-service channel for creating and tracking requests
  • Introduced new e-services with ease and integrated field inspection services for all departmental and core business inspection activities, including shop openings, new construction, advertising, food processing, and maintenance services, ensuring compliance with Islamic law and practices
  • Worked with Oracle Partner Omnix International to develop ISRI, a geographical information system (GIS) that provides analysts with a Web-based application along with comprehensive viewing and editing tools to produce many layers of geographical information on top of Makkah’s region map
  • Acquired a reliable and scalable development platform to accommodate future changes, as the municipality’s services change rapidly

Why Oracle

“The municipality needed fully integrated, highly scalable, and robust products to achieve a successful IT transformation strategy with a customer-centric, e-services platform,” said Dr. Ibrahim Abdullah, IT director, Holy Makkah Municipality. “We also wanted to be flexible enough to accommodate future extensions of system features and functions.”

Implementation Process

Following a three month analysis period, Oracle Partner Omnix International decided to segregate the implementation into four phases. Omnix International’s business consultants realized that this approach would better serve the project’s objectives and goals, as each phase simplified the scope and requirements to achieve quick wins.

The implementation covered correspondence and archiving across the entire municipality to enable HMM’s employees to execute daily transactions between departments and with third parties. The document management and archiving solution maintains all scanned documents and files under a single master repository, using optical character recognition (OCR) and indexing techniques to assure better handling, management, securing, searching, and stored document retrieval.

In addition, the project involved more than 35 IT-based services that were segregated according to their sensitivity and importance. Service automation focused on e-services for public and engineering offices, as well as the core business, covering all data processing, registrations, approvals, fees calculations, maps editing, and permit issuing, using a unified platform—eliminating the need for scattered legacy systems.

Providing training for 260 engineering offices and approximately 2,300 employees across HMM’s internal departments, as well as 12 decentralized municipal offices, was one of the biggest challenges. The municipality’s IT department provided system users with on-the-job training to ensure properly conducted daily transactions for high quality services for the public.

Partner

Oracle Partner Omnix International, a leading provider of IT solutions with a proven track record of successful Oracle implementations and a large team of Arabic speaking consultants, was chosen as a partner due to its demonstrated understanding of HMM’s requirements and the municipality’s implementation roadmap.

“Integrating Oracle’s Siebel applications with our geographical information system, called ESRI, enabled personnel to deal with Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) products while processing normal transactions, which was critical. Omnix International showed outstanding commitment, vast and proven experience, and unique technical expertise. These factors, along with the support and commitment received from our management and personnel were key differentiators for this strategic implementation,” Abdullah said.