Case Study: Gwinnett County achieves dramatically faster plan issuance and reduced IT overhead with Accela SaaS

Saying Goodbye to Costly Upgrades and Creating a Path for Future Growth

Gwinnett County, a suburban Atlanta jurisdiction of about 957,000 people and a long‑time Accela customer, faced mounting maintenance burdens from heavily customized, self‑hosted Civic Platform deployments. By 2019 they were several releases behind and wanted to expand use across departments and integrations without making future upgrades even harder, so they evaluated options and chose a move to Accela’s SaaS Civic Applications to stay current, refocus IT away from data‑center management, and simplify supportability.

The county migrated to Accela’s Azure SaaS environment and adopted solutions including Accela Planning, Accela Building, Business Licensing, Accela Mobile, ePermitHub, and enhanced reporting/analytics. Results included plan issuance dropping from 20 to 3–5 days, each plan examiner saving about eight hours per week, inspector ETA improvements of 62.5%, reduced office foot traffic and phone inquiries, stronger security/compliance, and a scalable platform with 36 additional projects planned.

Gwinnett County