Deep Dive: Digital Transformation at West Dunbartonshire Council

West Dunbartonshire Council has embarked on an ambitious digital transformation journey for their workforce, replacing decades of manual processes, spreadsheets, and paper timesheets with a unified workforce management system. What started with Teacher Booker in their education teams has now expanded across multiple service areas, fundamentally changing how the council manages its timesheeted workforce.

We sat down with Stella Kinloch, who has been instrumental in driving this transformation from a payroll and operational perspective. Her vision goes beyond just digitising existing processes – it's about upskilling the workforce, creating transparency, and delivering genuine efficiencies that benefit both staff and service users.

Watch or read the full interview with Stella below:

Background

Picture this: services manually phoning round staff to check who's available. Spreadsheets here, emails there, paper timesheets somewhere else. Everything takes ages. Payroll working to incredibly tight deadlines with hundreds of lines to review. Errors creep in whenever information gets rekeyed from one system to another. Staff submitting timesheets then hear nothing until payday – and if something goes wrong, they only find out when they don’t get paid.

West Dunbartonshire’s systems didn't talk to each other. They'd evolved over ten years into this complex web that everyone just worked around because they had to. Then their existing timesheet system was due to be retired. Instead of panicking, Stella and the team thought: what if we actually fix this properly?

What's different about West Dunbartonshire's approach is they didn't just buy something off the shelf. Local government has all these unique terms and conditions, specific payroll requirements, audit obligations. They needed a supplier who'd actually listen and build something that worked for them, not force them into a generic box.

What drove you to want to bring all timesheet workers onto one system?

Stella: “From an early stage, we saw an opportunity to start the journey of a single system which would offer the functionality we required, for timesheets across the whole of every council service. The inefficiencies were obvious to all. For example, the processes to seek out supply staff and to offer and record overtime work hadn't changed all that much in the past ten years. That had to change.

We needed to be utilising our systems much more efficiently and deliver more streamlined processes for employees, administrators, and managers. It was a real opportunity to move away from the one-way traffic of timesheet submission with no visibility until payday. This was about us offering a transparent approach for both managers and staff to see updates, even after payday, to see what has happened and why.

How were departments managing timesheeted workers before?

Prior to working with Teacher Booker, services would be manually phoning around staff to seek out availability, matching to the skill sets required, and then employees submitting their timesheets. And these timesheets would then be transferred to a central timesheet for approval and then for payroll submission.

Departments would be using spreadsheets, emails, paper timesheets – really a mix of all three – before we moved on to the Teacher Booker system. The biggest challenge for us with that previous system of timesheet submission was timescales and error rates. Payroll works to really strict deadlines and processing timescales. The officer's time to review hundreds of lines would be time consuming.

How does this programme align with WDC’s digital transformation goals?

A key strategic delivery for West Dunbartonshire Council support services is about achieving high standards of management, strong performance and an effective use of our resources for positive outcomes. Driving up digital skills within our workforce and utilising systems to remove waste, duplication, and improve accuracy need to be embedded in all that we do to deliver for our service users as well as our employees.

In terms of our goals around automation, workforce visibility and controlling costs; decisions on effective and efficient services and workforces are made on the basis of data. And having the ability to retrieve this management information will improve our service design and our decision making. The efficiency and effectiveness of delivery of those services brings about cost savings because ultimately, within the management team, we are in charge of base value across all of our services.

In terms of leadership responding to these changes, it's certainly early days in terms of our journey. However, as more and more services are linking up and hearing about the functionality that the system offers, the successes that have already been achieved, as well as these inefficiencies that I've spoken about, the support to invest has been growing.

Which departments or worker groups are part of the rollout - and why were they prioritised?

We started with our facilities management team. That is our catering and cleaning colleagues within our schools and the wider estate but mostly it is made up of the school establishment. We felt that operationally, that was one of the best places to start. They use a number of timesheets to support that service and they would benefit from the use of the same system. This service also had the least risk in terms of providing contingency should the need arise. The realisation of the benefits though have been quickly established with this group.

We're using existing data to find the service areas that utilise timesheets the most in terms of volume and error rates. We work with these services to introduce and demo the system that will deliver the efficiencies in terms of the staffing resources. There is a well established roadmap in terms of bringing the benefits of the system, and these efficiencies will be realised so much quicker.

Why did you want to be involved in a build project rather than buying something off the shelf?

We wanted to initiate a project where we would be developing with a supplier because local government workforces are unique in their terms and conditions. We needed a supplier who would be understanding of this, be ready to work with us, and be ready to meet all of those requirements. We needed a product that would be meeting the framework that we had delivered with Scotland Excel in terms of that scope.

Key details from the scoping were delivered from our workshops with our services. So we asked our services what were key deliverables for them. We talked around approaches over time, and the seeking of cover was the same way across most services. So that made it a much easier fit to look at what we would require from a supplier, albeit we were now doing it across all services.

In terms of having something tailored to West Dunbartonshire, it was essential that we found a supplier that would provide us with something that was tailored to our terms and conditions. They're unique to our council. We had to ensure that these have been met and we'd deliver our payroll requirements, which in turn must meet our own audit obligations. So having all these boxes ticked was really key.

What advice would you give to other councils thinking about digitising their workforce management?

So in terms of digitising workforce management, in terms of timesheets, I think one of the takeaways for us was ensuring that we looked at our processes and found our pain points or our waste. There's no value in replicating that in a digital system. Secondly, I would suggest fail fast. Be ready to change and adapt. Be agile enough to approve those changes.

The decision makers need to be at the table or you will lose momentum. And you need momentum when you're dealing with an online system that is pushing out changes essentially every week and at the same time having to meet payroll deadlines.

I think for ourselves in terms of what helped us achieve our success rate with that has been a lot of collaboration with our services, having all the key stakeholders at regular meetings. I think a lot of good planning and good communication with our workforce, with our administrators and management teams so that nothing was a surprise. Really good collaboration. And that helped us provide the solutions to challenges very quickly and to overcome any resulting pain points.