Manual processes slowed critical LIM report delivery

Serving more than 90,000 residents in New Zealand’s lower North Island, Palmerston North City Council is responsible for providing Land Information Memorandum (LIM) reports—containing detailed information on land parcels—to people looking to buy a property. According to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987, the council has 10 working days to deliver on each valid report request.

But the process was frustratingly complex. Customers submitted forms by email, then paid for the LIM report separately through internet banking. The LIM officer manually confirmed payments with the finance team to provide a reference number. They then contacted building and planning services teams to gather land information, generated images in a third-party system, and uploaded everything to MetaStorm to create a PDF report. When errors appeared, officers had to route the document to IT for manual corrections before emailing it to the requester. The entire process could take up to eight working days.

The inefficiencies were exacerbated by 2025 legislation updates that required councils to include natural hazard information in every LIM, such as earthquake zones, volcano paths, and flood risk data.

With changing legislation, Palmerston North City Council needed a single, scalable platform to speed the delivery of LIMs. After a rigorous security intrusion test with its network provider, ServiceNow successfully blocked simulated malicious activity, giving the council confidence that it could successfully implement an online public self-service offering.

“Our vision is to offer a digital-first, customer-centered approach to serving our residents and ratepayers,” explains Ryan Eames, Chief Information Officer at Palmerston North City Council. “Using the ServiceNow AI Platform, we can now respond to legislative changes quickly and deliver service excellence to our residents.”

A single platform enables same-day LIM request action

The council rolled out ServiceNow Public Sector Digital Services with the Government Service Portal to simplify this process. It works as follows:

• Property buyers simply find the address they need in the Government Service Portal
• They click the map to confirm
• ServiceNow automatically pulls land parcel and property IDs from the ArcGIS geospatial platform
• Property buyers can instantly make a payment with their credit card

Since the new platform launched, online credit card payments for LIMs have gone from zero to 90%. In addition, through ServiceNow’s integration with the council’s finance system, LIM officers can now confirm payment in just a few minutes, rather than days.

The council has also used the Service Request Playbook feature to guide LIM officers through each step of the process:

• LIM officers complete the compliance checklist and hit the release button
• Property buyers receive their LIM document via email, or they can download it directly from the Government Service Portal
• When a LIM officer is on leave, another officer can see the complete case history in the Playbook, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks

ServiceNow is now used to generate the PDF, which it also automatically writes to the electronic documents and records management system, the council’s Public Record Act compliance tool. If there is a compliance issue on the checklist, LIM officers can simply notify building services or other teams to fix the errors at source and then click the refresh button in ServiceNow. This helps to strengthen data governance and compliance control.

“As a result of using ServiceNow Public Sector Digital Services and the Government Service Portal, a process that previously took up to eight days is now digitally processed in less than half an hour,” says Kerry-Lee Probert, Regulatory and Development General Manager at Palmerston North City Council. “It’s possible for LIM reports to be sent to requesters within 24 hours if needed, but our officers generally take a little extra time to make checks.”

Kerry-Lee continues: “This project is a fantastic example of a technical and legal process bringing digital and business experts from across our organization together to solve a problem. Involving the right people from the start means the outcome works for staff and our community—it’s a real win-win.”

The efficiency gains are even more dramatic behind the scenes. Council Transformation Consultant Ravi Nyayapati highlights that 51 data objects are needed to define a land parcel, and that it used to take five days to collect them with legacy systems. Now, the council collects 46 of those 51 data objects in just 25 seconds. It plans to automate the collection of the remaining five data objects in the coming months.

“The LIM project was a finalist for the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) ICT Project of the Year,” Ravi says. “The interest in this project from other councils has been overwhelming.”

Contact center resolves cases up to 20% faster—support service expands to more councils

Palmerston North City Council’s contact center looks after customer requests ranging from pothole repairs to broken streetlamps. It is busy work at the council’s trust, perception, and reputation frontline.

Customer service agents were recording each case in a tool built for knowledge management, but the approach was inefficient and lacked transparency.

“The key to a successful contact center is automation, workflow management, and efficient knowledge management,” Ryan says. “Our knowledgebase was outdated and clunky. We made a conscious choice to modernize the contact center using a world-class workflow tool.”

The modernization of contact center project used ServiceNow Customer Service Management and Genesys Cloud. The integrated platform gives customer service agents instant access to all relevant data, whether they are responding to live chats or phone calls. The improved efficiency has given officers space to focus on stewardship and data quality.

Customer and Community General Manager Danelle Whakatihi says agents can now create a case every time and resolve them faster with better search and case summarization capabilities.

“We achieve a time saving of 15 to 20% and we have fewer errors, with knowledge surfaced to the agent rather than the agent having to search for it,” explains Danelle. “There is also potential for AI to help us make further improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.” 

Using the ServiceNow AI Platform, Palmerston North City Council also provides out-of-hours support for other councils throughout New Zealand.

“As a Center of Excellence, the contact center has been able to scale support for 46 local councils and nine businesses,” Danelle adds. “It’s about helping councils to reduce costs while elevating their ratepayer service. It’s pretty cool that we can help out the rest of New Zealand during emergencies.”

Scalable platform accelerates service delivery and adapts to changes

Palmerston North City Council’s implementation success stemmed from several critical factors: strong executive sponsorship, structured design, collaboration, and continuous reporting to keep the organization informed.

The digital build component of the LIM project was completed by just four people, supported by multidisciplinary council experts. The ServiceNow components were single-handedly designed and built by an internal Digital Transformation Architect, Jerin Matthew, without any external partners—and were ready for testing within four months. The structured approach means several building blocks can be reused for other council services, such as permits and consents.

The council has an ambitious roadmap, with the immediate focus on the alcohol permits process and legislative requirements. The council will also extend its ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management to support long-term planning cycles and ensure that its investment funding aligns with business objectives.

“The beauty of ServiceNow is that it is repeatable and reusable across all other legislative frameworks,” Ryan says. “If legislation changes, we simply tweak the SLAs or compliance checklists. The speed of delivery will be much faster because we’re reusing the patterns and APIs we’ve already established.”