Permits shouldn't hide in the machinery.
Knoxville's permitting process moved through four separate divisions, each with its own forms, handoffs, and data re-entries. In 2023, the City hired Avèro to find the friction, fix the workflows inside Accela, and reset the process for how applications move from submission to approval.
A permit application in Knoxville could pass through four divisions before it got a decision. Residents and developers never saw the handoffs. They just saw the wait.
The City of Knoxville runs permitting across four separate divisions: Plans Review and Inspections, Engineering Permits, Signs and Markings, and Civil Engineering. Each owns a distinct piece of the approval process. Each runs on its own forms, its own queue, and its own slice of the same Accela instance. From the applicant's side, it's one permit. From the back end, it's four handoffs with manual data re-entry at each step.
That worked when volume was low. It stopped working as the city grew. Residents couldn't see where their applications sat in the process. Developers couldn't predict when a decision would land. Staff were spending time reconciling the same information across divisions instead of reviewing the substance of what was being proposed. The software wasn't the problem. The process underneath it was.
In August 2023, the City hired Avèro to fix it. Not to sell them new permitting software. Not to rip out Accela. To do the unglamorous work of mapping every workflow, finding every friction point, and redesigning how the divisions coordinate inside the system they already had. That's a different engagement from what a software implementer or a reseller would offer. That's buyer-side process expertise, and that's what the City asked for.
Six deliverables. One cleaner process.
Six pieces of work, each one feeding the next. Process maps fed the assessment. The assessment fed the Accela reconfiguration. The reconfiguration fed retraining. Retraining fed the public-facing rollout.
Discovery sessions
Interviews and workflow mapping with every intake division separately. Plans Review and Inspections. Engineering Permits. Signs and Markings. Civil Engineering. Process maps, pain-point inventory, and data-flow analysis grounded in what staff actually do, not what the procedure manual says.
Assessment report
Every process gap paired with a specific fix. Cost, timing, resources, and named stakeholders for each recommendation. A roadmap the City can execute against, not a slide deck.
Accela configuration playbook
Division-by-division guidance on forms, screens, and workflow steps inside Accela. Not generic best practices. Specific to Knoxville's actual use cases, and built so the City's own staff can maintain it after Avèro leaves.
User retraining
Role-based curricula tied to the new workflows, not the old ones. Each division trained on the specific changes that affect their work. No generic LMS module.
Self-service portal rollout
From manual hand-offs to resident and developer self-service. Application submission, document upload, and real-time status tracking move outside of staff email and into the portal. Less phone time. Fewer dropped threads.
Integrated reviews
Multi-division reviews now happen in one coordinated loop inside Accela instead of as four parallel paper trails. When Plans Review and Engineering Permits need to sign off on the same application, they see the same workspace.
Same playbook. Different problem.
Avèro's methodology runs on the same six steps, whether the engagement is a full ERP modernization or a targeted process redesign. At Knoxville, there was no software selection, the City already had Accela. The work concentrated on steps 01 (Discover) and 02 (Require), then jumped directly to 05 (Govern) as we rolled out the optimized workflows inside the existing system.
Discovery
Current state, honest constraints, political temperature.
Requirements
What success looks like in language you can defend.
Evaluation
Demos that answer your questions, not their script.
Contract
Every clause read against what we've negotiated before.
Governance
Buyer-side PMO. IV&V. The oversight the agency needs.
Operate
Knowledge transfer. Benefits realization. The handoff.
From wait times to real-time.
The Accela reconfiguration is rolling out across the divisions, starting with Plans Review and Inspections and Engineering Permits. The manual hand-offs that used to happen between divisions now fire inside Accela as coordinated workflow steps. Applicants see a single status timeline. Staff stop re-entering the same applicant data four times.
Self-service portals are live for permitting submissions. Upload documents, track status, respond to reviewer comments, all in one place. Phone time for simple status questions has dropped. Staff are spending more time on substantive reviews and less on shepherding files.
Integrated multi-division reviews are the harder unlock. When an application needs sign-off from Plans Review and Engineering Permits, the two divisions now work in the same Accela workspace on the same record, not in parallel paper trails reconciled later. That took more reconfiguration than any other piece of the program.
Others who hired us for similar work.
City-scale engagements, process-focused, department-specific. Each link opens a case study.
City of Winston-Salem
Another city modernizing a specific back-office function. UKG-based HRIS and payroll rollout, managed buyer-side from governance through go-live.
Knoxville Police Department
Same city, different department. Technology strategic plan and RMS replacement, where Avèro ran procurement and now manages implementation.
Tarrant County
Process-heavy ERP replacement planning at county scale, across Budget, HR, Payroll, Purchasing, and the Auditor's Office.
Running something similar? Let's talk.
Thirty minutes. No pitch. If Avèro isn't the right fit, we'll tell you who is.