National Lottery

Company

An Post National Lottery Company (NLC) is licensed to operate the National Lottery in Ireland by the Minister of Finance on the Minister’s behalf in accordance with the National Lottery Act 1986. They provide world-class, exciting and engaging lottery games that bring fun and entertainment to the Irish public but also raise funds for good causes.

Challenge

The NLC manage over five thousand Lottery agents at any given time with new agents coming on stream every year. The process of managing applications from these agents is long and complex, spanning multiple stages and departments with multiple documents required. That resulted in “a lot of email,” many meetings, potential missed messages and sometimes confusion about who owed what and when. NLC had recognised that the existing process was inefficient and could be improved significantly with the introduction of a structured workflow process to enable it to respond faster to these agents. NLC had worked with ERS on a number of other successful development projects and commissioned ERS to review the Agent Licensing Approval Process (ALAP) with a view to streamlining the process to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.

Solution

ERS preformed an in-depth analysis of the agent licensing requirements to identify all stages and stakeholders involved. With 75 individuals spread across 13 departments this was a lengthy process and involved multiple meetings with key stakeholders to gather all relevant information. The decision was made to use Microsoft SharePoint as the platform of choice for the agent licensing process. A custom workflow was designed to manage each stage and SharePoint document management capabilities was seen as ideal for storing all documentation relating to an agents application.

This was a very complex project delivered over a 9 month period and involved integration with a number of existing legacy applications. The process now fully manages applications from new agents who wish to apply to become Lottery re-sellers. The process transverses multiple agencies, 13 departments and some 75 individuals throughout the application process. Each stage of the agent approval process is now completely controlled requiring specific steps, checks and approvals before it can progress to the next stage. Once the development phase was completed our solution consultants deployed the SharePoint migration to the new infrastructure.

Results

With the new workflow process in place NLC can now quickly and easily track every agent throughout each stage of their application process.  As soon as an agent’s application is received staff can now leverage workflows to track every step of the process. When scheduled milestones within the process change dependent milestones change automatically instead of having to be individually and manually adjusted. The system now provides management with a clear picture of the status of each agent application and a compliant audit trail of each stakeholder’s interaction in the process.