Streamlining planning and building applications: how Objective Trapeze saves time for local government teams

In local government, digitising processes can be a game changer—especially when you're drowning in paperwork. For one senior planner turned manager in a regional local government in Western Australia, Objective Trapeze has helped transform how they handle planning and building applications. Let’s dive into their story and discover how Trapeze helped them ditch inefficient paper-based workflows, save time, and tackle the day-to-day challenges of serving a dynamically evolving community.

What are the main benefits you have found from using Trapeze?

The huge benefit is just being able to do everything digitally. I recently moved down to a smaller but very fast growing regional local government (LG) in WA's Great Southern Region. When I started there, being a smaller regional LG compared to that of the previous large metro LG, it was a very paper-based system that I reverted back to coming here. 

Application packages were being printed off at put into folders, assessments were physical, then letters were being created digitally, then printed and signed physically and then scanned again etc. basically, it was super inefficient. 

In turn, I created a business case to get Trapeze here and demonstrated the quick changes we could implement with it. 

We worked out that by utilising Trapeze in our process for Building and Planning applications (as well as a few other minor administrative changes) we would be saving approximately 7.5 hours of time a week and entirely digitising our process in doing so.


Another benefit is the ease and speed of measurements. Also being able to calibrate the scale is a massive thing, as we get a lot of plans scanned and they are not always perfectly to scale as a result. As a manager I will be using it far less, mainly only to stamp approved plans and sign them, but even that it does it within seconds compared to someone hand stamping and then hand signing so many potential pages. Some of the Building Permit packages can be around 70 pages!

From just a standard administrative PDF editing tool, it is very handy for that also. At the larger metro council I was at, we got it for our admin team and they used it a lot for marking up PDFs, collating PDFs, deleting pages etc.

What are the challenges council is still facing in the planning space?

    Having software that communicates with other software. For example, at the larger metro LG we had Trapeze, and then CiAnywhere as our content management system, and the two of those talk to each other. Conversely here at the regional LG, we use an older and very out of date content management system, which integrates with basically nothing except itself. That makes things tricky and requires a few work arounds, to get documents from one system to another. 

    Access, measure, mark up and save documents from your eDRMS directly within Objective Trapeze.

    Especially for small and regional LGs, a common issue is receiving application documentation, specifically site plans, that have been drawn by 'mum and dad' applicants, who may have not dealt with these processes before and attempt to throw site plans together. The result is sometimes something that has been scanned multiple times etc. and in turn, the scale no longer works. 

    Having the ability to calibrate the scale using Trapeze is a huge help here as we can generally assume utilising this means we are measuring plans close to correct scale, whereas before, doing this manually it was basically impossible, and sometimes its not always easy to get this detail improved by applicants due to not dealing with things before.



    Interesting in learning more about how Objective Trapeze could help your local government teams work more efficiently. Get in touch with us today.