Grocery Store Wine Sales Prompt Tennessee to Take the Paperless Plunge
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The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Commission aims to shift its licensing process to an online, self-service portal before wine hits supermarket shelves in July 2016.
It was an oenophile’s dream: More than 78 cities voted via referendum in November to let supermarkets, convenience stores and big-box retailers sell wine across Tennessee.
But for the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission, which still handles licensing and enforcement on paper, the additional customers and inspections at thousands of grocery stores statewide posed a logistical nightmare.
So the agency contracted out the development of a 24-hour, online self-service portal for alcohol licenses and permits to San Ramon, California-based Accela, a civic engagement cloud service provider.
“The agency is going to be issuing quite a few additional licenses, and the process is complex—requiring information about owners and shareholders and enforcement and commission reviews,” Karin Vertefeuille, Accela’s director of business development, told Route Fifty in an interview. “That’s a significant amount of work.”
License applications can be 50 pages long and take anywhere from three weeks to months to be approved. Tennessee ABC currently processes more than 130,000 transactions a year.
The approximately $3 million Accela project is still in the planning phase, but fortunately the state’s new wine law doesn’t take effect until July 1, 2016—plenty of time to launch ABC’s portal.
By simplifying submissions into an online application and renewal process, entrepreneurs who were once dissuaded from opening restaurants and bars because of long wait times might now open new businesses in Tennessee.
With the portal, backend workflow is improved so complex permits take only two-and-a-half to three months to complete and one-time event permits less than a day. Electronic documents would replace paper files.
Enforcement efficiency is expected to increase as well with inspectors using smartphones and laptops out in the field to transmit photos and other data back to the main ABC office remotely.
Toward the project’s end, Accela will add on a “product wizard” that walks aspiring business owners through the steps of opening a restaurant or bar from licensing and permitting to occupancy and fees.
Accela’s platform allows departments to interface with each other throughout the application process to provide approvals without having to hand paperwork back and forth.
“I’ve seen the days of doing everything on paper, and such an enormous improvement can be made with technology,” Vertefeuille, who previously served as the director of central licensing in Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection, said. “Citizens and applicants expect it, and states are really rushing to catch up and improve what they do on the backend.”
Dave Nyczepir is News Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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