DeKalb County

DeKalb County worked closely with citizens and community leaders to enhance the delivery of planning, permitting, and development services through an innovative technology solution that enables effective communication and collaboration between county officials and community stakeholders. The solution automates the management of:

  • Land planning
  • Development applications
  • Entitlements
  • Long-range planning
  • Geographic information systems

Prior to implementing the Electronic Plans Submission and Review project, managing these operations involved many manual processes that were complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming.

The county typically accepts and reviews several hundred residential, subdivision, commercial, and special-use site development plans (SDPs) annually. Along with various forms and checklists, multiple sets of a paper plan were previously required for each submission, and each plan contained between six and 25 sheets per set, leading to hundreds of pages per submission. Furthermore, SDPs are often reviewed multiple times, sometimes with multiple resubmissions required until all county regulations are met. Manually keeping track of paper plan sets, documents, notes, and collaboration among various county departments throughout the process demanded extraordinary resource-management efforts and staff time, and it proved to be a labor-intensive process for customers.

DeKalb County’s Department of Technology and Innovation worked closely with county departments and Avolve Software to implement ProjectDox, a market-leading solution for submitting and reviewing electronic plans. Deploying the solution required re-engineering many of the county’s internal business processes along with innovative thinking and collaboration from all stakeholders. It allowed the county to eliminate many paper-based, manual processes and to enhance the overall interoperability of planning and development systems. The project also created a more transparent means of working with citizens and businesses.

The technology solution connects to existing, structured databases; handles unstructured data, such as plan and document files; and manages an integrated set of complex workflow and forms-based processes. Moreover, the system is easy to use and accessible at all times to citizen stakeholders and county departments.

The online availability of digital plans eliminates the need for physical plans to be routed among various county offices. It’s now common to see the time to complete the permit process reduced by 50 percent and the time needed for second reviews reduced by as much as 70 percent. As a result, the permit process can be shortened by days and even weeks. In addition to saving time, the online process is more accurate since all reviewers are now confident of looking at the same plans at the same time.