Matamata-Piako District Council Delivers on strategic sustainability goals

Matamata-Piako District Council has been on a digital transformation journey since 2016. Their initial goal was to have fully digital council meetings – including minutes, agendas, reports and contracts that need to be distributed and signed through elected representatives.

The outcome they wanted to achieve was an efficient green solution for circulating and approving documentation and items, which also helped them achieve their broader strategic sustainability goal to reduce carbon emissions.

Even though they had progressed to generating council meeting content digitally, each month they still needed to print documents, then courier these packs to councilors (using 3 x cars as they all lived in different directions). This not only took a lot of time to orchestrate, but also had a cost associated with paper, printing, couriering, and storing files – not to mention carbon emissions from the couriers.

Following extensive research and reviews of other products over a couple of years, MatamataPiako District Council selected Secured Signing, and has been using it since October 2019. The initial phases of the digitization project revolved around planning, cost-analysis and educating staff on how the adoption of digital signing would heavily benefit their day-to-day activities. Secured Signing’s platform allows council staff, councilors and constituents to fill-in and sign legally binding documents, from any device, anywhere, at any time. These documents are secured the moment they are signed by Secured Signing’s use of PKI digital signature technology. Once the document’s first signature has taken place, the document is “sealed” securing the document, meaning no edits can take place. From an audit and compliance perspective, this was a huge benefit and provided Matamata-Piako District Council with peace of mind, knowing Secured Signing had them covered against tampering and unwanted modifications. Secured Signing was easy to use, understand and implement. It’s form builder was intuitive and allowed the full digitization of documents. One-off or multiple use documents could be created, dependent on demand. This allowed Matatmata-Piako District Council to modify documents such as Standing Orders and enabled the full digitization of agendas & minutes. Adoption of the platform was made easy by the fact that signers of documents did not need to have a license of Secured Signing’s platform to sign any documents.

Meeting minutes and agendas fully digitized for signing – saving on paper, postage and physical storage. Using Secured Signing keeps things managed, visible and ensures the person that is signing documents off, has the right delegative authority to sign. Secured Signing enabled MPDC to get rid of paper processes and move to a holistic digital process for filling out forms and capturing signatures, allowing them to meet their sustainable strategic goals.