Lenexa, Kansas, Doubles Business Licensing Volume and Eliminates Overtime and Seasonal Staffing

City processes licenses more efficiently to support economic growth in the community

Founded in 1869, Lenexa is located about 12 miles south of Kansas City, Missouri. Lenexa is considered a city of choice for a variety of high tech and bioscience companies, as well as a number of national and international headquarters.

The City of Lenexa used to send out between 3,500 and 3,800 business, animal and alarm permit license renewals at the end of each year. All of the payments would come back at the beginning of the year, which was a huge drain on the clerks up front. Lenexa also had to hire additional staff for three months to manage the workload.

How Accela Empowers Lenexa

Lenexa went live with the Accela Civic Platform in 2008. “By automating our licensing processes in Accela,” shares Trudi Wenger, Information Specialist with the City of Lenexa, “we can setup renewals by group and schedule print times. Scripting-wise, it just happens.” As a result, customer service representatives only have to process a couple hundred licenses per month. The City can now manage all of its licenses without hiring additional staff or outsourcing assembly and mailing.

Citizens have multiple ways to interact with the City and can submit license applications or renewals online, on a mobile device, through the mail or in person. Staff can then process and approve the application. With a central repository of information for addresses, employees can see a history of all activity associated with a specific address or business instead of having information siloed across different applications and departments.

The Bottom Line

Lenexa now handles 7,500 business licenses on a yearly basis—roughly twice what it managed previously—without requiring increases in staff or workload. Thanks to the increased productivity and reduction in manual data entry, the City was also able to take on rental properties and processes roughly 1,800 licenses annually. And, after analyzing its licensing data, Lenexa discovered that alarm permits and animal licensing did not provide a big revenue stream for the City, and made the decision to outsource them in order to focus on core efficiencies.