The Ministry of Business, Immigration and Employment is looking at ways to increase the use of Immigration New Zealand’s new Microsoft platform.
The MBIE team plans to improve productivity throughout the organization by automating and using smart technologies to manage workloads better, as well as taking advantage of the collaborative framework that the new platform supports.
“Think of the current system as like Lego blocks,” said Microsoft consulting team programme director Mark Anderson. “Now Immigration NZ can add new visa types themselves, without relying on a tech partner to do it for them.
Immigration New Zealand (INZ) achieved a world first by operating its automated Dynamics 365 system in a multi-year, $62.4 million project that resulted in a $22 million depreciation charge to retire the system’s predecessor.
A new visa processing system called “Adept” was created to make immigration processes easier for employers and immigrants.
The system set a new standard for immigration departments around the world, said Emma Barrett, public sector director at Microsoft New Zealand,
“Adopting an automated Dynamics 365 solution is something no other country has done before, and there’s real potential for other immigration departments around the world to adopt the same approach,” she said.
Managing the processing of hundreds of thousands of visa applications and covering more than 200 visa categories every year is a huge and specialized operation. Developing the new system in an employer-led manner allowed immigration officials and applicants to benefit from a more efficient, faster, and less stressful process.
The old system was very paper-based, which made it difficult to share knowledge or work with other INZ offices and customers online.
“Some visa types had longer than ideal processing times,” said Annie Kim, manager of Adept operations at MBIE. “We wanted to improve the efficiency of processing and break the link between visa volumes and our capacity to process them. We also wanted to enable work to be shared more widely so we could reduce wait times and costs.”
Anderson and Microsoft’s consulting team set out to INZ so they could manage the system on their own, which would then reduce how much they needed to rely on an outside tech partner.
One of the main issues to consider was the current case-based application procedure. The goal is for the process to be activity-based, allowing applicants to submit their applications to many people rather than just one.
Having a digital platform was essential, and Microsoft Dynamics 365’s no-code/low-code platform gave us the solution we needed.
It meant that our team could make changes without waiting for an external partner, and we could do it all within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
The platform provides a central repository for all of the different types of data used in processing applications, from biometric information to supporting documentation. It also uses machine learning to prioritize cases, so the most complex ones are automatically escalated.
Operators can now work on any device, including their smartphones, and they can access the system from anywhere in the world. The interface has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible, with drop-down menus and simple search functions.
The new system has already had a positive impact on processing times. Overall, the time it takes to process a visa has been halved, and in some cases, it’s been reduced by 75%.
There have also been significant improvements in customer satisfaction levels, with the majority of users finding the system easy to use.