Annual insurance of court buildings, property and employees is contracted each year by the High Court Council, on behalf of the courts. In order to do this, each year the HCC needs to obtain relevant information from all the individual courts, i.e. value of equipment, value and size of buildings, number of employees etc.

The process of obtaining and gathering of that information has so far been semi-manual. The HCC would send out excel questionnaires which were to be filled out by the courts and submitted via email to the HCC, which would afterwards aggregate all the gathered data and compile it into needed reports/tables. Having in mind the number of courts as well as the fact that the courts often submitted more than one questionnaire, in case of needed changes in the initially submitted one, the entire process usually took up one to two months.

As a continuation of previous efforts related to capacity building of the HCC Material and Financial Affairs Sector, “4 Digits Consulting – Judiciary and Public Sector Support” has, under the USAID funded “Institutional Strengthening of the High Court Council” project, worked actively with the HCC in establishing a tool for automation of collection of data needed for annual contracts for insurance of court property and employees. An independent web-based module has been developed and implemented as part of the existing HCC HR management application, which has also been implemented under the “Institutional Strengthening of the High Court Council” project. The courts were enabled to submit the required data through an easy-to-use tool which is already well familiar to them and the HCC has been released of the time-consuming administrative burden of manually aggregating the gathered data. This resulted in all the data needed for this year’s annual insurance contract to be gathered and aggregated in less than four days – only a fraction of the time that was needed earlier.