About
The City of Edinburgh Council is one of Scotland’s largest local authorities, delivering over 700 services to residents across the capital and is supported by thousands of employees working in varied roles from central functions, frontline roles and more than 300 schools. The organisation operates within a complex environment, with diverse teams and a wide range of Human Resources (HR) and operational needs spanning the entire workforce.
The Challenge
Several Council teams were relying on manual, email-heavy processes with little visibility or control. In HR, requests were handled using approximately 50 shared mailboxes, with multiple attachments that could relate to one or multiple employees.
This made it difficult to view everything relating to a request in one place, creating challenges such as:
- Increased the risk of follow-up emails or amendments being missed.
- Managers being unsure which mailbox to contact and would ask for updates to individuals who they had contacted before.
- Related information sitting in a different mailbox.
- Requests could be sent to multiple places, meaning different team members could unknowingly be working on the same issue.
Several processes required actions to be completed off-system. Flexible retirement approvals relied on paper documents being passed between heads of department with no clear tracking or visibility of progress against required timescales. While IT leaver processing relied on a fortnightly review of complex, large spreadsheets to check across approximately 50 different systems.
“Our operational areas had little automation and were struggling to understand which areas the greatest demand was coming from and the volumes received which would allow them to align resources appropriately. There was some digital enablement using dedicated mailboxes for specific requests, but that was the extent of the development.”
– Janice Novak, Lead Consultant
With the contract ending, the Council needed a platform that simplified the way requests were captured, improved transparency, offered enhanced reporting and could be shaped directly by HR and IT for an organisation of this scale.
The Solution
The City of Edinburgh Council implemented Halo as a single platform across HR, IT and CPS, supporting over 350 staff with a unified place to capture, route and track work. Together they configured the system, replacing email-driven processes with clear forms and workflows. Shared visibility and linked tickets now make cross-team tasks, like actioning organisational leavers, approvals and access requests, far simpler and quicker to manage.
Each ticket now enters a clear workflow, making it easy to see ownership, progress and related activity for agents, employees and managers. HR can future-date changes, standardise responses through canned-text, and tag colleagues when support is needed.
Complex processes were rebuilt with the same approach. Flexible retirement, which previously relied on paper documents being passed between different approvers, now runs through a single workflow with transparent approval stages. Routine queries flow through an askHR form, and the creation of agent-only fields mean teams no longer maintain parallel spreadsheets to track outcomes. Employees submitting the requests can see exactly the status of their ticket, reducing calls to helpdesks to chase progress.
Leavers’ processing was also redesigned. When a manager logs a leaver request to HR, Halo generates a child ticket for IT automatically, replacing the fortnightly, labour-intensive spreadsheet review and allowing IT to act on access updates as they come in. Linked tickets keep both teams aligned and ensure managers are kept up to date.
Self-service has improved across the organisation. Managers can search their submitted tickets, see where approvals sit and avoid emailing multiple inboxes for updates. The teams are introducing dashboards to give their services’ managers immediate insight into volumes and upcoming tasks for their operational teams.
“I’ve used three or four different service desks and this by far is the easiest… the self-service portal is so much better… and it’s easy to build as well.”
– Carrie Wildridge, System Support Lead
The Results
Since moving to Halo, the Council has seen clear operational gains, with streamlined processes and better insight across high-volume services.
- HR now has clear visibility of requests across around 50 shared mailboxes through a single structured platform.
- Around 3,250 leavers are now processed each year, a task that previously required a full day every fortnight to review spreadsheets across approximately 50 systems but is now handled as part of a simple daily workflow.
- 74% of all requests now come through the self-service portal, ensuring all teams receive correct information from users.
- Around 5,000 HR tickets per month now run through Halo, giving the council clear insight on volumes and trends.
- Manual handling significantly reduced, with information captured once through structured forms rather than via email or spreadsheets.
- Managers have clear visibility of all their requests, with the ability to search and track requests directly.
- Flexible-retirement decisions, previously a 3–4 month process that was paper-based with no visibility, is now fully workflow-driven, removing delays for employees and ensuring the right teams receive the right information timeously.
"We can clearly see demand and structure services accordingly now. We’re excited about other services joining us and seeing where Halo can support joined-up ways of working across those services.”
– Janice Novak, Lead Consultant
Halo now provides a platform that the Teams can shape themselves, with more Council services beginning to adopt the same approach as their needs evolve.