City of Seattle: Utility Assistance Program (UAP)

Improving the Application Process

The City of Seattle continues to make serving its citizens efficiently a priority and desired an optimized processes to that end. Guided by this, the City sought to create a single, unified application form that could cover all of its Utility Assistance Programs—thus consolidating administration of multiple programs into a single platform.

Combining the application process for Seattle’s assistance programs benefits the City in several ways.

• Improves efficiency/volume and reduces overall costs of receiving and processing assistance applications
• Reduces errors and increases accuracy through unified program processing and data validation
• Minimizes opportunities for assistance cases to get lost or stuck in the application process
• Maximizes the ability to allocate and manage work among City resources
• Enables better reporting and historical vision for process tracking
• Creates cross-platform efficiencies by integrating several systems such as Customer Care and Billing

When requests for the Utility Assistance Program went out, TEAM IM’s expertise, proposal, and reputation as a registered and trusted provider of technical solutions with the City led to procuring the contract for this endeavor.

Utilizing WebCenter Content and our proprietary Modern UI middleware layer, TEAM IM developed custom Angular applications for front- and back-end interfaces. The front-end is an accessible, mobile-responsive application portal for submitting new assistance requests and managing existing cases. The back-end Case Management portal supports role-based operations for multiple Assistance Programs. This includes a combined branching workflow, robust case auditing, and detailed report generation.

Early reactions from the City have been very positive. The new platform went live in August of 2022, with deliberations already underway for a follow-up phase to expand on and supplement the platform. Potential additions to the initial rollout include features such as document scanning, sensitive information redaction, enhancements for records management, the addition of further assistance programs, and more. This expansion has a go-live goal of March 2023.

The success of this project and its continuation and expansion can be attributed to TEAM IM’s relationship with the City of Seattle and the use of our Modern UI IP. This project was completed successfully despite pandemic related delays, changes in leadership, and technical hurdles. Thanks to teamwork between the City and TEAM IM, no obstacle proved too daunting to overcome. That likely would not have been the case if one of our competitors had won the City’s contract. TEAM IM’s Modern UI middleware is what makes application stacks like the UAP and the Procurement Portal possible, as no one else can offer this advanced middleware layer.