Responding rapidly during a global crisis

The problem to solve

As Australia began taking steps to manage the global outbreak of COVID-19, the Department of Home Affairs needed to ensure continuity of the supply of critical services. In light of these exceptional circumstances, Home Affairs and the Australia Border Force (ABF) were required to exercise discretion in relation to relaxing student visa holders’ conditions for working beyond their usual 20-hour per week limitations in specific industry sectors.

Home Affairs needed a solution that would allow them to manage requests, send emails, create PDFs, be secure, and be operational within days.

How we solved it

To facilitate this Annex rapidly built a web-based case management system to allow businesses to apply for relaxation measures. The system allowed for information to be submitted where it was then processed through a workflow allowing HA to assess, approve and send out certificates to applicants. The system also had reporting capability to understand trends and metrics on the many submissions.

The outcome

With this automated system, the department was able to process hundreds of applications within minutes rather than manually processing which was taking days. The rapid deployment allowed HA to quickly respond to the COVID-19 crisis and stay up to date with political action from the federal government.

The system allowed selected businesses to easily and transparently apply for visa conditions relaxation for their staff to meet the supply of critical services.