With the volume of FOI requests continually increasing and scrutiny of process and response at an all time high, IRRA allows departments to be confident in managing requests made by the public under the Freedom of Information Act, a central aspect of any departments Information Governance strategy.

IRRA is built on our mature case management and tracking platform and inherits the wealth of features our technology provides. IRRA was specifically developed to deal with the extensive nature of RTI and FOI request tracking. Incorporating best practice case management process flows, IRRA helps government agencies manage FOI requests efficiently, reducing data duplication and ensuring responses are produced consistently, within the enforced timeframes.

IRRA's extensive functionality is aimed at simplicity, visibility, and providing a system that delivers full guidance and accountability across all users. Standard reports, together with a comprehensive ad-hoc report generator, allow you to "Manage Up" by monitoring individual and process performance against your SLAs and KPIs.

The use of IRRA for FOI Request Tracking ensures compliance with organisational policy, whilst allow departments to continual improve their processes for greater efficiencies.

Bay's IRRA can provide a number of benefits, including:

• A repeatable, auditable, defensible RTI process
• Single electronic case file repository allowing simple extraction of reporting data
• Improved management ability to set, monitor and escalate external activities associated with a request.
• Ability to measure performance against targets.
• Improved responsiveness.
• Secure access to the right information at the right time.
• Streamlined workflow processing to optimise performance.
• Reduced risk through tracking and monitoring responses.
• Increased organisational productivity through better information and automation
• Personal productivity gains through rapid adoption, system flexibility and ease of use.
• Better accessibility through integration with core systems.

What Does It Do?

• Allocations & notifications using e-mail.
• Effort and risk assessment.
• Customisable reporting with Management Report Builder.
• Flexible and configurable scanning options to deal with a variety of scanners.
• Secure data handling through the attachment and storage of documents, configured specifically for F.O.I.
• Protection of sensitive information through a 3-tier security structure.
• Automatic reminders and escalation.
• Colour prioritisation of overdue requests.
• Tracking of costs, fees and charges.
• Role based security.
• Integration with Microsoft® infrastructure and Microsoft Office® applications.
• Integration with email and directory services.
• Highly configurable templates that support the creation of notices and other documents.
• Extensive areas for commentary at all user levels.
• Integration to EDRMS (TRIM and e-DOCS currently supported)
• Integration to the Ministerial Correspondence System (MINCOR) that is in widespread use across Local, State and Federal Government

Service Request systems differ from many Help Desk systems by embracing a horizontal view of servicing and completing organisational requests.

The Service Request solution is designed to manage the business processes surrounding the registration, allocation, approval, and sign-off processes, from end to end - not just the data.

This means issues do not fall between the cracks and remain visible at all levels, through all phases. In many organisations, the responsibilities for such processes require the participation of many personnel distributed throughout the company. Service Request not only allocates and manages these processes, but also provides strong ongoing visibility of completion for external or internal customers.

The system does this by:

• Standardising the templates used in completing requests.
• Automating the registration, allocation and customer interaction of a request.
• Providing management views and reports for both internal and external use.
• Including extensive commentary of the resolution processes.
• Providing extensive reminder and escalation processes.
• Exploiting advanced searching capabilities.

The Service Request product will enable an organisation to efficiently and effectively track and manage all service requests. The system is designed to lower the risks associated with such activities, by ensuring consistency in business rules and approach, standardisation in templates, authorisation and acceptance procedures, and management visibility of the individual and collective requests in the system.

Based on Business Rules

The Service Request product matches the business rules and procedures required by the organisation and as a result:

• Enables compliance with guidelines and procedures.
• Promotes greater accountability through visibility and decision-making.
• Delivers more efficient and supporting record keeping.
• Enables more efficient use of resources.

Australia's commitment to the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) has further increased the need for an accountable and defensible contract management process to support procurement within Australian government agencies and multi-national enterprises.

Contract 4.0 has been developed especially for Australian Government procurement conditions and deals with the core issues related to:

• Automating the often manually intensive processes of collaboration, advice, approval, and vendor interaction, in the formation and administration of procurement contracts.
• Providing a central data and document repository that dramatically improves the visibility of contracts, their ongoing status, and their variations.
• Supporting rich data categorisation allowing customers to analyse their contracts for downstream review of profile, performance, compliance, and business improvement.
• Providing consistent and repeatable corporate governance in ensuring adherence to standard processes, procedures, and templates.

Business Benefits

There are a number of business benefits available to any organisation embracing Bay's Contract 4.0:

• Cost savings in improving collaboration and efficiency in contract formation and maintenance.
• Consistency of process and outcome due to use of common processes and templates.
• Improvement in quality outcomes for contracts.
• Adherence to internal corporate governance and processes.
• Compliance with regulatory requirements.
• Business intelligence for performance monitoring and business improvement.
• Reduction in business risk.
• Increase in contractual procurement visibility at all levels.

Functional Overview

Contract 4.0 supports the procurement function within medium to large organisations by automating the formation and ongoing management of both simple and sophisticated contractual agreements. The system is centred on the role of the "procurement team" assisting them with the processes and collaboration necessary to form and maintain quality contractual outcomes.

This means managing the contributions and interactions with both the internal business stakeholders and the vendor representatives when forming and maintaining an overall governance process.

Specifically, Contract 4.0 focuses on the role of procurement team officer and the various interactions, approvals, negotiation, and advice with vendors, internal advisors, delegates, and signatories.

The system deals with two major common forms of Head Agreements within large organisations namely:

• Standard form Contract or
• More complex agreements tied to a Panel, such as a Deed of Agreement

A Deed of Agreement (DOA) is a contracted obligation that provides the qualifying set of conditions for a vendor engaged through a panel arrangement.

In both forms of agreement, Contract 4.0 supports the notion of sub-agreements representing either Variations or Work Orders.

Principles Adopted

Contract 4.0 is based on fundamental principles of contract formation and management ensuring that the contracted obligation at any point in time is represented by a combination of:

• A Head agreement (DOA or Contract) including their variations; AND
• A series of sub-agreements applied to the Head agreement (Work Orders) including their respective variations.

Operation

A contract item within Contract 4.0 is therefore a registered start to end process that results in the formation and signoff of a legal procurement agreement between customer and vendor. The physical contracted document(s) (and any subsequent variations) are treated as a "document payload", continually adjusted, versioned and refined until complete for signature. Variations and changes can be applied at all levels from a Contract or a Panel down to a Work Order.

Business Process

Contract 4.0 implements an Agreement Compilation process that provides a means to establish and record agreements and vary agreements between parties. Workflow and business rules are used to guide users through pre-defined governance processes.

A Panel Item, Deed of Agreement Item, Contract Item and Work Order Item are all used to establish and record agreements. Deeds of Agreement items, Work Order items, and Variation items are always raised against a previously established item type.

A contract Item establishes and records agreements, manages the workflow process from start to end and results in a definitive and agreed set of Attachments leading to the latest version of the agreement.

Version control is not applied to a contract Item. Rather, Contract 4.0 will maintain Agreement Attachment Sets (AAS) that identify sets of electronic files that constitute versions of the agreement.

Incident 4 is the only Cooperative product specifically dedicated to your Department's management of issues and incidents. Use it out of the box or as an enhanced platform for customising to your agency's requirements.

Incident 4 is the ideal platform for managing isses and incident related to:

• Occupational Health and Safety Incidents
• Non-compliance incidents
• Business impairment and improvement
• Any business issue that needs to be registered, evaluated and then allocated for managed remedial action throughout your organisation

The application of the Incident 4 system in your organisation dramatically reduces the risk and cost of critical issues within your organisation going un-noticed or un-actioned until it too late to avoid the downstream consequences.

Incident 4 builds on a heritage of Bay's Corporate Governance products with enhanced performance and scalability, and now incorporates Divisional response for more complex organisational structures. Expanded and personalised views further improve information visibility across the organisation. Incident 4 is only one product within Bay's family of item tracking and management products.

Incident 4 Overview

The Incident 4 product is an enterprise application and implements the most common business processes dealing with high level incident management within an organisation.

The sophisticated and flexible nature of the system means that it can be utlised for managing those critical elements of:

• Health and safety issues
• Ongoing compliance issues
• Rectification and/or remedial issues
• Audit issues
• Key organisational actions

Incident 4 provides the full end-to-end delivery of high-level organisational workflow and ensures that issues do not fall between the cracks.

Features

Incident 4's extensive functionality is aimed at simplicity, visibility, and providing a system that delivers full guidance and accountability across all users.

The following features support this:

• Allocations & notifications using e-mail.
• Document attachment and storage.
• Automatic reminders and escalation.
• Colour prioritisation of overdue items.
• Role based security.
• Integrated with Microsoft® infrastructure and Microsoft Office® applications
• Integrates with email and directory services.
• Highly configurable for templates, actions, drop down lists, messages.
• Extensive areas for commentary at all user levels.

Background

Bay Technologies is a product company specialising in Cooperative products that are highly modifiable and have addressed the item tracking and management needs of government organisations for around 10 years.