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The Shire of Augusta Margaret River sits on the southwest coast of Western Australia, serving a diverse community that spans urban townsites, agricultural villages, mixed farming activities, coastal areas and forests. ERP Project Manager Kris Davis describes it as a community that is “progressive, young and ready for change”.
That character is reflected in the Shire’s own workforce, which is varied too: lifeguards, pool staff, outdoor depot crews, librarians, recreation centre teams and administrators.
For two decades, the Shire’s operations relied on an ageing ERP that was due to reach “end of life” in 2030. Built on outdated architecture, it struggled to integrate with modern tools, limiting flexibility for staff and residents alike. That could mean enabling parents to work from home when needed or allowing depot crews to do their jobs from the truck rather than having to return to the main office.
Alongside this, the Shire was strongly motivated to improve customer experience outcomes, so was looking for a partner that could deliver both back-office and community-facing tools that would meet its technical requirements as well as its community engagement needs.
The Shire knew that replacing the legacy ERP platform would never be a like-for-like exercise. It was a once-in-a-generation decision about how the organisation worked.
The technical task was to replace the entire ERP stack: finance, customer relationship management (CRM), regulatory, field operations, HR, payroll, and time and attendance. The question underneath was how to do this while preserving the Shire’s unique and vibrant culture.
The Shire approached the project with eyes wide open. Before going to market, it engaged a third-party consultant to undertake the requirements work and, crucially, spell out what an ERP transformation costs an organisation over five years.
“We didn’t want to know what you read in the brochures; we wanted to know what it really means to put your council and your residents through that much change,” says Davis.
That pre-work set the tone: this would be a project run by a council that understood the real cost of change rather than discovering it the hard way during the project.
One outcome was the strategic addition of a dedicated change manager for the life of the project. This was seen as critical by the Shire’s leadership, who recognised an ERP was not just a finance solution, but one that would impact the whole organisation.
Datascape was selected through a competitive process and Davis says it stood out as “the most modern solution”.
“I like its approach. It's best of breed, focuses on what you do well, but also utilises other applications that do their job well. That makes it easy to implement.”
The Shire is implementing Datascape for CRM, financial, property, rating and regulatory functions, integrated with a range of existing and planned solutions. These include Pulse for HR, Element Time, Datapay, MyDatascape and Antenno for ratepayer communication, Microsoft SharePoint for information management, and Fieldwork for outdoor crews.
It’s a three-year programme with an ambitious schedule, with phase one of three currently underway.
For Change Manager Oakley Driscoll, implementation started with setting the right tone across the project.
“We were all in it together, which lightened the load. This was an important foundation for moving into a big cultural change like this.”
From there, Davis and Driscoll built the project around a small number of non-negotiables.
“We always consider the person before the project,” says Davis. “We push when required but not at the sake of someone’s mental health.”
The team also prioritises face-to-face communication, trying to speak with people in person before relying on email or phone.
Project team members work from the depot in the mornings before crews head out and then again, in the afternoon, when they return. They also sit alongside library and recreation centre staff and make themselves visible.
A change champion in every business unit
Regular sessions give people visibility of what is working and what isn’t, helping extend involvement in the programme across the organisation.
The Shire has used quick wins and momentum from Pulse as a springboard for the wider transformation. “This set up trust that people would be supported, and that there would be comms and workshops,” says Driscoll.
The project has a dedicated structure: a weekly CEO update, monthly directorate messages, a monthly project newsletter, posters around the office and a project homepage staff can access in their own time. Communication flows from leadership as well as the project team.
The Shire uses monthly executive leadership team meetings for medium and higher-risk discussions, with the project control group meeting fortnightly for lower-risk decisions, enabling the project to keep moving at the right speed.
“Our motto has always been progress over perfection,” says Driscoll. “It has tested me but it made everyone realise you must let go of your expectations. We just move forward every day. Progress is better than perfection. Let's learn together.”
For the Shire’s Director of Corporate and Customer Services, Mel Stevens, that same ethos has defined the relationship with Datacom.
“Working with Datacom has felt like a genuine partnership. The strong relationship between our teams has enabled us to navigate challenges collaboratively, solving issues together and maintaining confidence and momentum throughout the first phase of the project.”
While the wider transformation is still underway, the programme is changing some of the Shire’s everyday processes and laying the groundwork for others.
Historically, payroll took three people three to four days of manually keying in timesheets. With the deployment of Datascape, Element Time and Datapay, that process is being replaced by an automated flow from timesheet through to pay.
Every depot vehicle is set to have a tablet with Datascape and Element Time. Crews will be able to log in between sites, watch the latest CEO briefing, submit timesheets without having to return to the office and see their roster on the fly. Lifeguards and pool staff, who rarely sit at a desk, will have access to Element Time on mobile devices.
The Shire’s community is close-knit by nature and Antenno is enabling it to extend that connection through targeted, two-way digital communication, allowing the Shire to reach the residents affected by a particular issue.
“Bringing the depot into the greater team has been a really big focus,” says Davis. “Exposing the good work that they do.”
Driscoll says staff have been receptive to the move away from existing manual processes.
“I’m really surprised how open people are and excited they are to move from the manual to the digital world,” she says. “There’s so much frustration with the existing process that it isn’t a hard sell.”
ERP transformations are as much about change as they are about software. The Shire’s approach shows what that can look like when a council embraces the human side from day one: a dedicated change manager, a relationship-first way of working and an honest “progress over perfection” approach, all in service of the Shire’s original goal of better outcomes for the community it serves.
For councils weighing a similar move, the Shire’s experience points to some practical principles: invest in the change function as well as the platform, put people before the project and don’t let perfection become the enemy of progress.
Many local government teams are facing resourcing challenges, with constrained budgets and growing demand for their services. The right technology can play a critical role in addressing these challenges.
The Datascape platform was built for local markets and supports councils and local government to streamline operations, engage with their communities, efficiently deliver regulatory services and better manage their assets with greater transparency.
