Cupertino Saves Nearly 2,000 Hours a Month with Workflow Automation

Overview

Quicker, More Efficient, and User-Friendly Workflows Are Saving Nearly 2,000 Hours Per Month and Counting

In the heart of Silicon Valley, the City of Cupertino is home to close to 60,000 residents and headquarters to many businesses, including Apple. The city's 200-plus employees across more than a dozen divisions are constantly updating the internal processes they use to deliver services to constituents.

"Collectively, we often found ourselves asking, 'Where's that form?' We spent an inordinate amount of time hunting down approvals and documents ourselves."

Teri Gerhardt

Innovation Technology Manager, City of Cupertino

Impact

Nearly 2,000 hours saved per month
~12 workflows automated
Zero processing errors

Challenge

Cupertino initially turned to Microsoft 365's Power Automate, but it came without form templates and required more technical expertise than staff had
Each employee built forms differently, so no standardization was possible
No central location existed to track forms across departments
Completed applications had to be manually converted to PDF and saved to the document management system

Solution

A template library let employees select the right fields and layout for their workflow
No-code architecture integrated quickly with SharePoint and Laserfiche
Workflow automation routed documents to every stakeholder with auto-generated alerts, regardless of how many people were involved
Forms like petty cash reimbursement auto-populate employee information directly from SharePoint
Laserfiche integration archives every finalized form as a PDF automatically
A dashboard identifies exactly where a workflow is bottlenecked

Results

Nearly 2,000 hours of staff time saved per month
Zero errors in processing submissions, across approximately a dozen automated workflows
A template library eliminates the need to rebuild future workflows from scratch

"There's a line of employees around the corner looking to convert their existing forms and processes using SimpliGov...everyone sees the benefit."

Teri Gerhardt

Innovation Technology Manager, City of Cupertino