City of Utrecht

The Utrecht Municipality recently switched to the latest release of our Enterprise Management solution. As the Manager for Development, Sales, and Business Operations, Eric Velthuizen was closely involved in the migration on behalf of the Utrecht Municipality. His role is to keep the ICT application for waste collection up to a satisfactory level of availability. He does this for the Markets and Ports Waste Collection Department (Dutch abbreviation: IMH), part of Utrecht’s Municipal Enterprises.

Well defined script

The starting point for the entire operation was a well-defined script developed by FAIT (For All IT Services), AMCS, and ourselves. How did they approach the job? Velthuizen: “Together with AMCS, the project managers, the users, and FAIT, we drew up a planning document. This had clear benchmarks: When do we want to go live? When do we have to go live? That document also laid down all the strategic tasks and specified everything that had to be checked. In short, a detailed planning schedule with all the risks and opportunities. We dealt with that so thoroughly that we had a solution for every scenario. It was our first update, so we took the time to look at it very carefully with the people from AMCS and FAIT. It was an entirely new and challenging experience for us. That was why we created an in-depth report so that could see from minute to minute whether we needed to make adjustments.

In the end, everything went very well and we were very contented. Ultimately, we can say that the migration was a complete success. On the Monday following the migration, we found that many users didn’t notice at first that new software had been installed. That was how smooth everything went. Later on, people noticed that some things were going more smoothly than they did before. In the test phase, all the people involved were able to test their part. AMCS resolved any malfunctions that occurred. The entire system was scrutinized from front to back and from top to bottom. That’s why we were able to decide: we can go live. The Master Test Plan was also very important in helping us decide what steps to take. Without that plan, we didn’t want to make the migration. After all, everything was new for us.”

More efficient business operations

Velthuizen: “Our ultimate goals are more efficient business operations, a better quality of service, and fewer errors in the operation. That’s what the Enterprise Management software is intended to help us with. Innovation related to this product is therefore of vital importance. The main thing is that we can conveniently standardize tasks. That our people can quickly master these tasks, and that they are free to get to work in their (incomprehensible) package. We haven’t yet used the tablet solutions of AMCS. I hear good things about them from users. At the beginning of next year, we will consider whether we can start deploying tablet solutions for certain elements of our services.”