York Region in Ontario spans more than 1,000 miles of Canadian terrain. Behind the scenes of winter storm preparations, York uses Cityworks to keep roads safe. Watch the video below to learn how Cityworks and ArcGIS help street crews make data-driven decisions for work orders and service requests for snow, salt, salt brining, and more.

Looking for some inspiration to help your organization operate more efficiently next year? Here are a few of the ways our clients around the country are streamlining their processes and making data-driven decisions using Cityworks and ArcGIS. We look forward to working with you in 2020 and can’t wait to discover all the amazing things we can accomplish together! Happy New Year!

1. City of St. George, Utah

Using Cityworks and ArcGIS, the City of St. George, Utah, was able to reduce cost, labor, and inefficiencies in public asset management.

2. The City of Augusta, Georgia

The City of Augusta, Georgia, was able to streamline their sewer line assessment process with the help of Cityworks and ArcGIS.

3. General Mitchell International Airport (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

With Cityworks and ArcGIS, General Mitchell International Airport transformed their safety inspection data into a robust enterprise asset management plan.

► You’ll also like: Weathering Winter Storms with Cityworks + ArcGIS

Do you have a Cityworks success story you want to share? Contact us at stories@cityworks.com! 

So, you just purchased a new computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Months of careful research, vendor interviews, product demonstrations, and internal meetings are behind you. Now comes the equally important task of implementation—but where do you start? Do you have a plan in place for taking the new system live? Have you dedicated the appropriate internal resources to the project?

Many organizations find it challenging to transition from procurement to the implementation of a new CMMS. Lehigh County Authority (LCA) in eastern Pennsylvania was no exception. The water and wastewater service provider purchased Cityworks in 2015 with the goal of breaking down data silos and improving the care of their recently expanded infrastructure network. Just two years prior, LCA had acquired the City of Allentown system through a concession agreement that not only grew LCA’s employee base but also doubled the number of assets in its care.

However, implementation didn’t become a priority for LCA until 2017. Around this same time, new regulations and operations standards shifted the organization’s focus to the development of a preventive maintenance program. LCA realized that a GIS-centric work management system would be a critical component of the program, but only if they aligned the technology to meet their strategic goals.

1. INVEST IN PERSONNEL

The first step LCA took was to enhance the capabilities of the information technology department to champion the success of the project. IT staff participated in Cityworks training and worked with other departments to set priorities for the project. First, they focused on the development of a structured asset tree, based in GIS, that included the nearly 100 vertical stations in their network.

By the end of 2017, the IT team began conducting discovery interviews with other LCA staff who were long-time CMMS users. They started talking with upper management and quickly moved to boots-on-the-ground employees. During these interviews, it became clear that the IT team needed a stronger CMMS knowledge base internally.

Billy Schanz, who worked at the time as an LCA operation technician, was fully engaged in the success of Cityworks. The IT team brought Schanz on as a CMMS technician to help spearhead the reimplementation initiative, and he has driven much of the progress LCA is experiencing today. 

2. ALIGN TECH WITH STRATEGY

Next, LCA had to establish the foundation of their preventative maintenance program. The program’s success relies on the availability of meaningful data to track key performance indicators. Up until early 2018, LCA staff used work order templates with no delineation between preventative maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM), making it impossible to measure and understand how assets were performing. 

So, the IT team worked with engineering and operations staff to clearly define CM and PM for all of the organization’s linear and vertical assets. CM is now defined as any maintenance activity, initiated either through an emergency or routine inspection, that requires repair or replacement. PM is any maintenance activity scheduled on a recurring basis according to internal discussions with engineering and operations as well as recommended maintenance from external suppliers.

From there, the team was able to modify its Cityworks work order templates accordingly. Now, field workers can complete maintenance activities using the Cityworks mobile native app on Androids and Chromebooks; supervisors can track current progress on preventative programs and prioritize corrective maintenance; and managers have the ability to view the organization’s progress through visual dashboards built in Microsoft Power BI. 

Some of the early PM programs, such as hydrant and manhole inspections, were quick wins. As those two programs evolved, LCA integrated its CCTV software with Cityworks to capture PM work there. Program after program, LCA delineated between PM and CM work order templates, allowing the organization to successfully measure and understand current practices as well as envision and shift strategic goals.

3. TRAIN, TRAIN, TRAIN

Initially, the IT’s team aggressive development approach to revamping the Cityworks platform caused ripples across the operations teams. The constant change in the platform and work order templates required frequent communication and training to ensure end users were successful in their daily tasks. Since reimplementation, staff using Cityworks has increased from 45 to 75 active users.

Now, two years into the reimplementation process, LCA’s internal Cityworks committee has shifted its focus away from constant change to staff training and system upkeep. With strategic programs and performance measurements in place, the current goal is to encourage ongoing adoption of the platform among new and existing employees.

The IT team designed laminated training cards for all operations staff, and each LCA vehicle is equipped with a set of cards to guide end users through the Cityworks mobile native apps. This quick reference guide allows staff to work through the application at their own pace.

Two-way communication is key to successfully implementing a software platform. The team has conducted numerous training sessions, both small and large, to inform end users of pending updates and technical changes. The IT team also embedded a Survey123 form into the Cityworks inbox to encourage colleagues to share their ideas, challenges, and general comments. 

Throughout the entire implementation process, the IT team focused on engaging employees at all levels of the organization to ensure their voices were heard, they were properly trained, and they had access to a product that would fit their needs with ease of use.

ON THE HORIZON

LCA has big goals for the continued development and adoption of a successful CMMS platform, including the implementation of Cityworks Storeroom to help manage the organization’s large material inventory. LCA also plans to integrate its ERP system with Cityworks Service Request module to streamline communication between the customer service team and the operations team. In early 2020, LCA will kick off a project aimed at assigning value to vertical pumps and HVAC systems to accurately calculate the frequency and cost of preventive programs.

Cityworks has provided Lehigh County Authority with a central management system to better understand the organization’s physical environment and assist with important business decisions. With the help of Cityworks and ArcGIS, all teams in the field and the back office have the answers they need at their fingertips to make better planning and emergency decisions.  

Chris Moughan is the Lehigh County Authority Chief Information Officer. Mark Bowen is the Lehigh County Authority GIS and Cityworks Manager.

While GIS has long been an important tool for municipal departments—water utilities and public works, for example—we’ve seen increased implementation across more unique aspects of municipal government. As GIS continues to become easier to use, easier to learn, and easier to implement, we will see local government and utility organizations adopt location intelligence as a key indicator for responding to constituent demands and solving community needs.

For example, a municipal organization may choose to implement a GIS-centric 311 solution, not just for the intake of resident complaints and service issues but also to gather data to assess and improve parity among service areas.

Machine learning tools will also become more accessible and easy-to-use, even for cash-strapped municipal organizations. For instance, a city could leverage the cameras deployed around its city as additional eyes for the public works department. Camera imagery can be surveyed and analyzed by computers trained to identify what a pothole looks like. With that detection, a pothole repair work order could be automatically generated in a GIS-centric work management system. This takes into account hundreds of potential data-driven points to generate work activities as organizations continue to strive to improve their level of service.

Smart technologies are enabling more capabilities for collaboration across cloud platforms, the Internet of Things, machine learning, and tools for data analysis. GIS will play a significant role in connecting the dots. GIS is more than the location of assets—it helps illustrate the connections and dependencies throughout your entire network.

Maybe a community is trying to turn on critical services after a hurricane to ensure safe conditions for its residents.

Maybe a water utility is implementing smart sensors to actively reduce water main breaks and service disruptions.

Maybe a city permitting department has connected its database with an online licensing portal operated by the state.

Data analytics and location intelligence will increasingly help organizations identify insights and data points to be shared among different municipal organizations and their stakeholders.

As municipalities and utilities become immersed in the importance of location intelligence, the next logical step will be to make these solutions multi-jurisdictional to include collaboration with neighboring communities and outside agencies.

Just imagine the impact of breaking down data silos across city, county, and state lines to improve operations and customer service. It’s time to think beyond smart cities and take it to the next level where organizations are empowering GIS intelligence to help build local communities with global connections for improved resiliency and sustainability.

By Rebecca Tamashasky, Vice President of Vision & Product Engineering

At Where: Cityworks Conference, Kristen Cox—Executive Director of the Governor’s Management & Budget Office for the State of Utah—discussed common pitfalls that organizations face and presented some innovative solutions to implement instead. Here are three ideas she shared, along with a video of her entire presentation.

1. Start by Stopping

“We see a lot of busyness, a lot of action, a lot of activities, a lot of change. And sometimes that change gives us the illusion of progress rather than real progress,” Cox said. “We want to start by stopping.”

She then shared a quote by Apple Inc. CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs:

People think focus means saying yes to the things you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things I haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying “no” to 1,000 things.

To further illustrate the concept, Cox showed a series of drawings by Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, The Bull Lithographs, 1945

“You can see his first iteration. The bull was very complex,” she explained. “And as he moves through, . . . he’s stripping things out. He’s getting to the essence of what’s really, really important. Of all the changes you could make, what should you make? It starts with, in some cases, what to strip away.”

2. Think Differently to Get More Out of the Resources You Have

Cox then introduced what she calls the Seductive 7—solutions that give the illusion of progress rather than facilitate actual progress. The first of these was “more money.”

“Being the budget director for the governor, I get a little grumpy when people come and ask for more money because here’s one truth: there will never be enough money to solve the problems in government,” she said. “Regardless of how much money we have coming in, for every new dollar of revenue we have come in, we have four dollars of requests. You just can’t fund everything. So, if we think somehow more money is going to come in and solve all of our problems, you’re going to be very, waiting for a very long time.”

She further explained, “If we don’t know how to use our existing resources, more of them won’t help. The illusion we have is that I’m using all of my resources as well as I can. . . . The right mindset we need to have is that there’s hidden capacity, and we just have to learn to think differently—to see different patterns and to figure out how to get more with resources that we have.”

3. Make It Easy for People to Behave the Way You Want Them to Behave

The next of the Seductive 7 that Cox shared was “more training.”

“The illusion that we have when we run into training is that the problem is a lack of information,” she said. “How many of you in this room know that sugar is not good for you? And how many of you keep eating sugar? Me too. Lack of information is usually not the problem.”

Cox then explained that the right mindset is understanding how to design a process that makes it natural and easy for people to behave the way we want them to behave.

“The minute I’m trying to train people into behaving the way I want them to behave, I’m losing because there’s such inertia in the current makeup of the system. I’m trying to use training to overcome how the system is designed,” she said. “We first have to design the system so that the inertia and the momentum of the system gets people to where we want them to be. And then we can use training to augment and to reinforce and to clarify. It can be powerful.”

Watch Cox’s full presentation below. (Closed captioning available.)

Did you know that January 15 is National Pothole Day? In honor of this bizarre holiday, here are some fascinating facts about the pesky potholes that plague our roads. Let’s dive in!

1. There are an estimated 55 million potholes in the U.S.

2. By 1909, the term “pothole” was commonly used by U.S. drivers.

3. According to a study by AAA, between 2013 and 2018, 16 million drivers across the country suffered pothole damage to their vehicles. 

4. The same AAA study also reported that pothole damage costs U.S. drivers $3 billion per year.

5. On average, U.S. drivers report paying $300 to repair pothole-related vehicle damage.

6. The U.S. has more than four million miles of roads.

7. In 2017, vehicles traveled 3.2 trillion miles on U.S. roads, the Federal Highway Administration reported.

8. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, 1 out of every 5 miles of highway pavement in the U.S. is in poor condition.

9. Citizens across the world have come up with creative ways to draw attention to potholes.

For example, artist Jim Bachor of Chicago filled potholes with mosaics depicting ice cream. 

Photo from huffpost.com

Other people have taken to “guerilla gardening,” planting flowers in potholes to help fellow drivers to avoid them.

And who doesn’t want to be warned about potholes?

10. Cityworks’ Pavement Management allows you to track materials, costs, work history, and pavement analysis data in one central location. Providing an easy-to-use communication link between Cityworks and pavement analysis tools like PAVER, Pavement Management assists in prioritizing work according to pavement condition, budgeted amount, and available resources. Click here to learn more.

And be sure to watch the video below to learn how SeeClickFix and Cityworks together enable citizens to report potholes and other issues quickly and easily.

In Escondido, California, it used to take days for city workers to remove a graffiti tag. But thanks to some community engagement and the Cityworks mobile native apps, graffiti is now usually removed within 24 hours.

Watch the video below to learn more about the innovative way the City and its citizens are taking back their neighborhoods. (Closed captioning available.)

► You’ll also like: Citizen-Focused Community Development

Located just west of Chicago, DuPage County is the second-largest county in Illinois and home to nearly one million residents. DuPage County has experienced extensive urban growth, with a 500 percent increase in population since 1950. This rapid urbanization brought with it a huge loss of agricultural land and a decline in open space, replaced instead with suburban sprawl. As a result, DuPage became subject to both local and riverine flooding.

In response to a devastating flood in 1987, the Illinois legislature granted DuPage County—as well as the other collar counties of Chicago—the authority to create a regional stormwater management program, which DuPage enacted in 1988. The mission of DuPage County’s Stormwater Management Department (SWM) is to mitigate the effects of urbanization on flooding, as well as protect for future impacts.

THE CHALLENGE

In an effort to reduce flooding and its associated damages, SWM owns, operates, and maintains 17 flood control facilities, 17 drainage facilities, and nearly 200 lots. SWM also monitors more than 300 natural area sites annually. SWM is responsible for monitoring, maintaining, repairing, restoring, and replacing all of the assets associated with these sites, which include pumps, actuators, generators, gauges, cameras, lighting, fencing, vegetation, and much more. For many years, SWM relied on weekly written flood control facility inspections, as well as a combination of verbal and electronic work orders, to maintain all of these assets and resolve any issues. As a result, some items were falling through the cracks—both figuratively and literally.

In 2015, SWM and DuPage County’s GIS Department implemented Esri Citizen Problem Reporter, a configuration of the Crowdsource Reporter application that allows the general public to report non-emergency problems from a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.

Residents in DuPage County now use Citizen Problem Reporter to submit non-emergency waterway issues—such as illegal dumping, stream blockage, stream erosion, and other water quality problems—directly to SWM staff. The app helps staff quickly identify and address issues, leading to faster and more efficient responses. 

However, SWM still needed a system to handle all of the assets the public could not see. Anthony Charlton, director of the Stormwater Management Department, was the driving force behind the move to a sustainable asset management system.

“We needed a digital system to connect all of our divisions, staff, and assets,” Charlton said. “So, we started looking for a technology that could help us improve asset management, track projects and productivity, perform cost analysis, minimize risk, and be better prepared for emergency events.”

THE SOLUTION

DuPage County as a whole has a solid GIS foundation, so it was important to find asset management software capable of integrating seamlessly with ArcGIS. Cityworks’ unique GIS-centric approach made it the obvious choice. It also helped that the DuPage County Public Works Department has been a Cityworks user since 2004, so the county already had much of its local drainage information in Cityworks.

In February 2018, SWM contracted with the Cityworks professional services team to jumpstart implementation of Cityworks AMS. The joint project team started by gathering and analyzing all of SWM’s paper forms, workflow routines, employees, structures, materials, and equipment. Next, SWM built an accurate inventory of all its assets, which were then mapped and stored into an ArcGIS database.

Cityworks professional services configured a custom Cityworks database that included work orders, service requests, and inspections collected during their analysis of SWM’s workflows and day-to-day activities. Before SWM went live with the new system, Cityworks also held a comprehensive onsite training that included server administration, as well as end-user desktop and mobile training. On April 1, SWM went live with Cityworks.

THE RESULT

SWM saw immediate benefits after implementing the software and establishing—and continually updating—the asset database. Cityworks provides SWM with an efficient reporting system to track staff hours, materials, and equipment needed for various jobs, which helps supervisors monitor progress. Now SWM can confidently manage, analyze, and track the condition of hundreds of assets; reduce the risk of failure; and improve the department’s emergency preparedness.

Data mobility is one of the biggest benefits of the new system. The Cityworks mobile native app gives SWM field personnel full access to Cityworks anytime, anywhere. Field crews can now conduct routine maintenance inspections without the need for paperwork. While onsite, they can access and update their tasks, generate work orders, and add attachments in real-time. The interactive map interface also empowers field crews to improve their efficiency by selecting work activities in the same geographic area.

Product features like real-time updates, attachments, automatic emails, comments, and special instructions help staff communicate more clearly. Interdepartmental communication, specifically between SWM and DuPage County’s Public Works Department, has also improved. In short, SWM works smarter.

Just a month after the Cityworks implementation, SWM put their asset management system to the test. DuPage County received more than five inches of rain in one week, prompting SWM to activate flood control facility operations.

“Not only did Cityworks help us manage, schedule, and respond to resident reports of flooding, but it was also a clearinghouse for all of the information associated with each request,” said Charlton. 

 “We documented who called, when they called, what they reported, what we found during our response with visual documentation and the eventual resolution. This data will be retained in perpetuity, so we can always recall what was done here in the past should any other requests come in.”

SWM is currently working with DuPage County’s GIS Department to integrate the Esri Citizen Problem Reporter app with Cityworks, allowing for a seamless transfer of data and attachments from incoming resident reports. This integration will help streamline the workflow from initial service request to associated fieldwork and final decision-making.

Implementing Cityworks and integrating Citizen Problem Reporter are just the beginning of an ongoing journey to develop a sustainable asset management system. Moving forward, SWM aims to use Cityworks throughout the entire asset management workflow from service requests through resolution. Whether it comes from a citizen report or an automated maintenance reminder, Cityworks will be the one-stop-shop for SWM.

Sarah Hunn is deputy director and Tamara Freihat is GIS analyst at DuPage County Stormwater Management.

Water and wastewater treatment are among the most critical components of a healthy community. The organizations that provide these services are also responsible for the care of highly complex and expensive assets—yet they often rely on outdated technologies and manual processes to manage their work.

In 2017, the Harford County Division of Water and Sewer began looking for a modern work management solution to help automate preventive maintenance, coordinate work activities between groups, manage material inventories, and capture important data. Having used Cityworks for their water distribution and wastewater collection systems since 2010, expanding the platform to support the treatment process was a logical solution. In 2018, the county partnered with KCI Technologies make this project a reality.

SILOED LEGACY

The Division of Water and Sewer is responsible for the operation, maintenance, administration, planning and engineering of public water and sewer facilities. Within the division, there are two main sections. Water Sewer Maintenance (WSM) is responsible for the maintenance of county sewer collections and water distributions systems, and Water Sewer Operations (WSO) is responsible for county water and sewer treatment systems.

While Cityworks was already used within WSM, WSO had managed their work in a series of homegrown Microsoft Access applications that have evolved over nearly 20 years. This approach had worked in the past, but the applications were cumbersome to maintain and keep compliant with Microsoft updates. The siloed systems also hindered important communication between groups and prevented consistent business practices, data capture, asset inventories, and reporting within WSO.

ASSET INVENTORY DEVELOPMENT

The first step of the project was developing an asset geodatabase that was accurately organized into an easy-to-navigate hierarchy. While an inventory of assets did exist, it was spread across a variety of data sources and formats and included data that was highly inconsistent and incomplete.

Through several database design exercises and work sessions, the team developed schemas for water treatment, wastewater treatment, and pump station asset groups. Although there were some differences between each, the general structure was kept consistent in order to support efficient data management and reporting.

During the design process, it became clear that the proper hierarchy and naming conventions were of critical importance to the usability of the application and overall success of the implementation. The resulting schemas created simple four- to five-level hierarchies that included asset groups and names provided by end users, rather than engineers or administrators.

CITYWORKS CONFIGURATION

With the asset inventory developed, the configuration to support each group’s critical business processes began. This included configuring Cityworks to support the management and automation of preventive maintenance programs, updating the user interface to improve usability, creating a new domain to hold all WSO work and not interfere with WSM operations, and implementing very detailed security requirements.

Perhaps the most interesting and challenging configuration was the need to support the tracking of a “Top 30” work list. WSO consists of four distinct groups: water, wastewater, pump stations, and the operations maintenance section (OMS). If work requires a trade expert—electrical or plumbing, for example—it’s assigned to the OMS group.

Over the years, the prioritization of OMS assignments had been challenging so, in 2017, the four groups signed a memorandum of understanding that outlined the procedures for assigning work to OMS and the expectations for OMS response. The water, wastewater, and pump station groups are each responsible for ranking their top 10 work assignments according to a defined process. OMS then uses the rankings to prioritize their top 30 work activities.

Prior to Cityworks, OMS had to retrieve and update their assignments from the three different work order sources. This meant exporting the top 10 assignments from each source and consolidating them into a spreadsheet. The rankings tend to change rapidly, and this process relied on manual updates to keep them numbered correctly. It was tedious work and often caused confusion between groups.

In order to improve this process, the implementation team configured a universal custom field in Cityworks to store a rank (1-10) for work orders. They also developed a custom automation that keeps the list in order—with no duplicates—at all times.

In addition, the OMS users were given an inbox that displayed a live view of all three top 10 lists, along with a consolidated top 30 list. Since all groups are now using the same system, they are able to monitor everything live and in one spot.

STOREROOM IMPLEMENTATION

Under this project, the county also implemented Storeroom for three locations that support both WSM and WSO. Prior to Cityworks, material inventories had been managed in three individual data sources, two using Microsoft Access and one using Microsoft Excel. The challenge was creating a master material list with standard naming conventions from more than 20 years of data.

On top of that, this data had to be mapped and migrated into Cityworks all at once to ensure a smooth transition for end users. Using carefully tested scripts and import procedures, the team successfully migrated 20,687 material records, 1,789 suppliers, and 41,455 supplier material records into Cityworks.

The implementation of Storeroom supported complex procedures for requesting and approving parts, which streamlined communication between maintenance workers and storekeepers. The entire material process is now handled through Cityworks and managed through strategic inbox tabs, each specifically designed based on user type.

THE RESULTS

With the new system now in place, Harford County expects to reap many benefits of upgraded work management processes, including better communication and transparency throughout the department. Data captured through Cityworks will help inform targeted preventive maintenance, capital improvement plans, operating budgets, and staffing requirements.

This foundation will help Harford County care for their complex assets while continuing to provide vital services to their customers. With the help of improved workflows, transparent communication, and flexible technology, the Division of Water and Sewer is better equipped to ensure the daily and long-term health of their community.

Joe Murk is a project manager at KCI Technologies. Contact him at Joe.Murk@KCI.com.

The beautiful coastline, a professional tennis tournament, and a vibrant downtown corridor are obvious attractions in Delray Beach, Florida. But the city, with support from Black & Veatch, is adding a feature that is invisible to most and beneficial for all. 

Delray Beach, the “Village by the Sea,” sits approximately 52 miles north of Miami on Florida’s Gold Coast. With a growing population estimated at 68,749 in 2017, Delray Beach is a vibrant coastal community. Each year, the Delray Beach Open tennis tournament draws more than 50,000 visitors who enjoy not only professional tennis but also the miles of city beaches and active downtown corridor.

To keep up with growth and to continue to provide residents and visitors with the level of service needed to sustain its infrastructure, the city recently replaced a legacy computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The outdated system, which relied on paper work orders, was unable to track work at the asset level. And there was a catch: the city needed to retire the legacy CMMS in time to avoid another year of licensing and maintenance fees.

City staff worked closely with Black & Veatch consultants to replace the outdated system with Cityworks. Black & Veatch was able to meet the aggressive implementation schedule, saving the city more than $40,000 in fees for the legacy system.

Delray Beach invested significantly in its GIS program by developing its own mapped utility datasets. City GIS staff used the Cityworks implementation as an opportunity to complete a migration and data update to Esri’s ArcGIS for Water Utilities, formerly part of the Local Government Information Model (LGIM). The improved asset data registry within the ArcGIS model provided a more robust and consolidated platform for city staff to manage and access physical assets.

“We utilized parts of the LGIM for our utility data and made modifications as needed to maintain institutional information that didn’t have an exact home within the schema. It’s been working well for us so far,” said Robert Mickla, utilities GIS administrator at Delray Beach. “Cityworks gave us a secure and easy way to bring mapped assets to our field personnel. The workflows implemented as part of the configuration will allow GIS staff to maintain that data more effectively.”

Implementation Approach

Delray Beach has successfully completed two rounds of Cityworks implementation: water distribution, sewer collection, utilities maintenance, parks maintenance, and right-of-way maintenance infrastructure in the first round; building maintenance, streets, traffic, and stormwater infrastructure in the second.

The initial implementation, completed in just three and a half months, required the migration or creation of more than 100,000 assets. Much of this came from the migration of asset and work history data from the legacy CMMS into the GIS and Cityworks databases. The team migrated over 23 years of legacy CMMS data, including more than 58,000 work orders, 11,000 service requests, and more than 93,000 inspections. Some of the inspections dated as far back as 1996.

The team employed a detailed data-mapping exercise to streamline outdated and overtly generic work orders (categorized in the legacy system as miscellaneous items) while endeavoring to minimize orphan records that might be created by consolidating work order and service request templates within Cityworks. These templates were standardized and updated to improve operational reporting and increase data integrity about the type of work completed.

The Delray Beach Public Works Department updated high-level business processes as part of the second-phase deployment. The department also incorporated vertical—or object class—assets so facilities management staff could more effectively manage HVAC, plumbing, and other mechanical systems.

Responding to Mobile Needs

Replacing paper work orders with digital field access was a huge priority for the city. Ultimately, the city chose Cityworks Respond as the day-to-day solution because of its robust tools and user-friendly interface.

Nearly 80 staff use Cityworks Respond installed on iPad Pro tablets with cellular connections. Respond’s always-connected capability is imperative for crews traveling all over Delray Beach. It also helps supervisors improve transparency and document maintenance activities by extending their communication capabilities beyond verbal telephone and radio interactions. Additionally, Respond’s ability to color-code work activities helps field crews clearly understand maintenance workflows.

According to Joseph Frantz, deputy director of public works, the ability for field users and supervisors to more effectively communicate and prioritize work has “exponentially increased productivity and efficiency.”

And Then There Were Iguanas

Since go-live, Cityworks has been used to help abate and monitor a unique invasive species problem: iguanas. A previous inspection of elevated tanks indicated that vent screening was missing from a particular storage tank. Unfortunately, this inspection was completed using a hard copy and, despite best intentions, a family of iguanas moved into the tank before the screen could be replaced.

Trevor Feagin, the Cityworks administrator at Delray Beach, created new custom cyclical work order templates and custom inspection forms to remind staff to inspect the vent screens more frequently until Cityworks can be fully deployed for the plant, preventing a recurrence of wayward iguanas.

Delray Beach leaders and utility staff value the Cityworks and ArcGIS project as one of the more successful IT implementations in recent history. The stability of the Cityworks platform, reliability of the ArcGIS database, and experience of the Delray Beach and Black & Veatch implementation team provide a foundation for continued success across the entire organization.

Traci Berlingieri is a senior systems architect and Mark Seastead is a regional asset management leader with the water business of Black & Veatch, an employee-owned engineering, procurement, consulting, and construction company.

In communities across the U.S. and Canada, pet licenses provide a valuable system for keeping tabs on our four-legged friends. When pet licenses are managed effectively, they not only help reunite lost pets with their humans—they also help municipalities track health and safety concerns. However, many pet license systems rely on cumbersome forms and processes that make data hard to share.

With the help of Cityworks and ArcGIS, the City of Racine developed a solution that not only tracks animal cases internally but also shares information with other departments.

Racine has been a Cityworks user since 2009, when the Public Works Department first implemented Cityworks AMS. In 2011, the Racine Building Department adopted Cityworks PLL. Since then, many processes that were tracked in either an Excel sheet or an Access database have been migrated to Cityworks. Cityworks is now used in almost every department, including the Health Department.

The Racine Health Department manages permits and licenses for bees, chickens, ferrets, and potbelly pigs—but the most common licenses issued are for cats and dogs. Each dog or cat case includes:

• Tag numbers
• Previous year tag numbers
• Animal name
• Gender
• Primary and secondary breed
• Color
• Neuter/spay status
• Rabies serial number
• Vaccination/expiration date

Each licensed animal has its own PLL case. All fees associated with the animal are recorded within the case, and categories such as ISSUED, CLOSED, DECEASED, MOVED, and EXPIRED help track the status of the license.

Each case is also tied to the tax parcel map layer by owner name and address. Because the pet cases are geocoded, staff across several departments can easily visualize and share valuable information.

For example, when the city receives a report of an animal bite or attack, they create a dangerous animal case. If the animal in question already has a pet license on file, the dangerous animal case is linked to the license. If not, the owner is required to register the animal so the issue can be monitored. This information helps protect code enforcement staff who may be walking around properties with a known dangerous animal. Employees can simply reference the map to stay informed, aware, and safe.  

The Police Department, which handles animal protection and control, also uses the geodata. They can run a report to search for a street name, owner name, or pet tag number to identify animals and contact owners.

Several aspects of Cityworks PLL have helped improve customer service. For example, a “renew” task has been configured so the city can keep track of license renewal dates, and the city runs an automated email campaign through MailChimp to help notify owners about upcoming renewals. The city also developed an expired case report that gets printed and mailed to each owner notifying them of expired animal tags. Although it may seem costly to print upwards of 1,000 expired notices each year, the city has found this process highly effective for encouraging license renewals.

The city also configured an inbox specifically for expired cases. Now, when pet owners stop by the office to renew expired licenses, they no longer have to wait for staff to track down the records. The inbox helps staff quickly and easily locate the appropriate case. A Cityworks account was also created for the Racine Humane Society to give adoption customers access to on-site, same-day pet licensing.

With the help of a GIS-centric licensing and code enforcement platform, Racine transformed a complex process into a transparent enterprise system that empowers and protects the community.

By Jacob Pitsch, programmer, City of Racine, Wisconsin

The City of Raleigh, NC, manages 10,000 acres of park land and approximately 200 parks. With Cityworks mobile native apps, ArcGIS, and the Bigbelly smart waste system, the city has streamlined their workflow while ensuring that their parks are clean and enjoyable. Now, instead of checking each trash can individually, sensors notify workers when a can needs to be serviced, and a work order is automatically created. Learn more below.

► You’ll also like: Fighting Graffiti with Cityworks and ArcGIS

In the City of Escondido, CA, the Environmental Compliance Department performs inspections at approximately 1,600 facilities at least once a year. Using Cityworks and ArcGIS, the department has been able to create a paperless process and streamline their workflow by utilizing historical data and visual map tools while in the field. Watch the video below to learn more.

► You’ll also like: From Worksheets to Smartphones with Cityworks + ArcGIS

Ah, the ubiquitous orange traffic cone. We see them practically every day, but what do we really know about them? Here are seven fun facts about these bright, conical marvels that help to keep us safe on the roads.

1. There are an estimated 140 million traffic cones in use worldwide.

2. Before the traffic cone was invented, wooden barriers and wooden tripods were used to mark dangerous spots on the highway. They were not easily seen and were often broken. They also had to be assembled for each project and were bulky to store.

3. In 1940, while working as a street painter for the City of Los Angeles, Charles D. Scanlon designed a hollow, conical marker to keep cars from driving over wet paint. He patented the rubber traffic cone in 1943.

In his patent filing, Scanlon explained that his three main objectives for his invention were to provide a marker:

• • that is “readily visible, yet which causes no damage to an automobile if the latter strikes it”
  • that “may be stacked so as to require a minimum of storage space, and to be easily transported”
  • “which will return to its upright position after a glancing blow, and which may be dropped from a moving truck and assume an upright position”

4. By 1947, rubber traffic cones were being mass produced, which means they have been used on roads for the past 73 years.

5. In 1961, British engineer David Morgan is believed to have constructed the first experimental plastic traffic cones. He currently holds the Guinness World Record for largest collection of unique traffic cones, which is made up of 137 cones and includes 2/3 of all types of cones ever made.

6. In the United States, approximately 1 million traffic cones are stolen each year. To help alleviate a similar problem in the United Kingdom, police departments throughout the country occasionally hold “cone amnesties,” giving citizens a chance to return “borrowed” traffic cones.

FYI, it is a misdemeanor to steal or purposely run over a traffic cone, so always treat them with respect.

7. Cityworks’ Pavement Management allows you to track materials, costs, work history, and pavement analysis data in one central location. Providing an easy-to-use communication link between Cityworks and pavement analysis tools like PAVER, Pavement Management assists in prioritizing work according to pavement condition, budgeted amount, and available resources. Click here to learn more.

Ah, the ubiquitous orange traffic cone. We see them practically every day, but what do we really know about them? Here are seven fun facts about these bright, conical marvels that help to keep us safe on the roads.

1. There are an estimated 140 million traffic cones in use worldwide.

2. Before the traffic cone was invented, wooden barriers and wooden tripods were used to mark dangerous spots on the highway. They were not easily seen and were often broken. They also had to be assembled for each project and were bulky to store.

3. In 1940, while working as a street painter for the City of Los Angeles, Charles D. Scanlon designed a hollow, conical marker to keep cars from driving over wet paint. He patented the rubber traffic cone in 1943.

In his patent filing, Scanlon explained that his three main objectives for his invention were to provide a marker:

• • that is “readily visible, yet which causes no damage to an automobile if the latter strikes it”
  • that “may be stacked so as to require a minimum of storage space, and to be easily transported”
  • “which will return to its upright position after a glancing blow, and which may be dropped from a moving truck and assume an upright position”

4. By 1947, rubber traffic cones were being mass produced, which means they have been used on roads for the past 73 years.

5. In 1961, British engineer David Morgan is believed to have constructed the first experimental plastic traffic cones. He currently holds the Guinness World Record for largest collection of unique traffic cones, which is made up of 137 cones and includes 2/3 of all types of cones ever made.

6. In the United States, approximately 1 million traffic cones are stolen each year. To help alleviate a similar problem in the United Kingdom, police departments throughout the country occasionally hold “cone amnesties,” giving citizens a chance to return “borrowed” traffic cones.

FYI, it is a misdemeanor to steal or purposely run over a traffic cone, so always treat them with respect.

7. Cityworks’ Pavement Management allows you to track materials, costs, work history, and pavement analysis data in one central location. Providing an easy-to-use communication link between Cityworks and pavement analysis tools like PAVER, Pavement Management assists in prioritizing work according to pavement condition, budgeted amount, and available resources. Click here to learn more.

I want to take a moment to thank all of the people and organizations who are working hard to keep their employees, families, and customers safe while continuing to provide critical community services. This is a challenging time for organizations across the globe. Please be assured that we remain committed to providing the support you need.

Like many businesses, Cityworks has implemented sensible travel restrictions. We have educated our employees about the COVID-19 symptoms and the CDC recommendations for personal hygiene, including the social distancing guidelines. Any employee with any symptom has been asked to work from home, and all employees have been given the option to telecommute. We will continue to follow the recommendations of the CDC and local public health officials.

With you, we will be imaginative, creative and flexible. Our geographically dispersed workforce allows us to come onsite when appropriate. We also have years of experience supplementing traditional onsite activities with virtual channels such as online training, support, demonstrations, system updates, and implementation. Current customers may access online training and support by logging in to MyCityworks.

We are committed to serving you and prioritizing your wellbeing and success. We are in this together. Cityworks remains committed and able to provide you the service and support you have always expected and deserve.

Stay well,
Brian Haslam
President and CEO

These are challenging times for communities across the globe. As each of us grapples with the impact of COVID-19, local government and utility organizations face an especially difficult challenge. How do you maintain operations while also making sure staff and customers follow public health guidelines for social distancing?  

Cityworks partners with a number of solutions providers to help meet your customers where they are—online and on their smartphones. Here are three ways you can improve communication and customer engagement while also taking your business processes online.

1. Business Portals

Code enforcement, licensing, and inspections are key areas of opportunity for online customer service. By setting up a public web portal for your permitting solution, you can empower customers to submit applications, pay fees, and complete outstanding items online. Public Access templates can be configured for a variety of business needs, from business inspections to health cases.

► You’ll also like: 4 Ways to Customize the Cityworks Public Access App

2. Service Request Apps

Whether you’re managing an emergency or business as usual, your citizens play an important role in reporting issues on the ground—but only if you have an effective means of streamlining and acting on their reports. A citizen engagement tool provides web and mobile apps that allow users to submit service requests with a few quick taps. With the help of the Cityworks API, you can bring those service requests directly into your asset management system and track related work. Many of these solutions include automated communication tools that update customers on the status of their service requests.

Watch the video below to learn how during Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, Cityworks users across the southern U.S. used Cityworks and Esri ArcGIS to prepare for the storms and keep their residents informed.

3. Reporting Dashboards and Hubs

Engaging customers also means providing reliable, transparent information. Because Cityworks is GIS-centric, you can easily use saved searches and enterprise URLs to publish Cityworks data to a map or an Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS. These dashboards can be used internally to keep staff and other stakeholders informed, or they can be shared publicly. 

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If you are running an initiative that relies on several sources of data, ArcGIS Hub may be for you. Esri’s Hub is an easy-to-configure community engagement platform that provides a complete focused portal for information and data sharing around a specific initiative. It can be used to provide information to citizens on items like testing locations and school closings, and it can also be populated with information from Cityworks.

Want to learn more about deploying a citizen engagement tool? Schedule a demo or contact your Customer Success Manager today.

By Brent Wilson, Vice President of Sales at Cityworks

Working in tandem with Cityworks PLL, every Public Access site can now be tailored exactly as desired. With the built-in customization wizard, administrators can quickly and easily create a public-facing portal that meets the needs of their citizens by making the user experience simple and painless.

Front-end, public-facing permitting and licensing solutions help a community run more efficiently by eliminating paperwork and streamlining the permitting and inspection processes. By providing a public portal to Cityworks PLL workflows, Public Access empowers residents and contractors to apply for logins, submit and view PLL work activities, generate reports, schedule inspections, and pay fees from the flexible interface. This functionality is possible out of the box and can now be customized to perfectly suit your community’s needs and preferences. Here are four new customization options.

1. Public Access 5.0, compatible with Cityworks 15.5 releases, allows administrators to customize Public Access directly from the website. Gone are the days when any customization to the Public Access website required customization of the site files themselves (XML or JavaScript). The administrator now has the ability to easily access the “Admin” customization section from their user menu.

2. Within the Public Access website, administrators can now add, delete, or edit any of the tabs that display on the landing page of the website. Whether searching for new residential construction permits, a zoning permit, or a commercial alterations permit, Public Access can help users quickly find what they are looking for. And by adding a filter, administrators can control which permits display on each tab within the landing page to ensure that all appropriate information is available.

3. Administrators can now customize colors throughout the website. For example, perhaps your customers have complained that certain text is too hard to read or the “Submit” button is difficult to locate. Anything can easily be changed to a different color. The “Colors” tab contains hundreds of color options to support any needs or preferences.

4. Messages are also customizable. Are you receiving feedback that certain instructions, prompts, or other messages on the website are difficult to understand? With Public Access, you can easily customize the language to guide your users through every step of the process. You can even add in a “Have a nice day, y’all!” if you would like. The possibilities are endless.

Want to learn more about Public Access? Request a demo or contact your Customer Success Manager today!

► You’ll also like: 3 Ways to Engage Your Citizens, Right Now

By Dan Puerling, Cityworks Subject Matter Expert

What if?

It’s a question that’s often posed but rarely answered. For Spotsylvania County Utilities Department, however, the answer to a Friday afternoon “what if” conversation resulted in an innovative process for handling the department’s private development construction projects, inspections, and approvals.

Located just an hour south of Washington, DC, Spotsylvania County has experienced a tremendous amount of growth over the past decade. But the Spotsylvania County Utilities Department was having trouble tracking the high volume of utility assets being constructed to serve new developments. 

The county decided to work with Timmons Group to create a new process for tracking and approving private development construction projects. The solution uses ArcGIS and Cityworks AMS and PLL to graphically illustrate and document the utility inspection and acceptance process from the date of site plan approval through the project warranty period.

Timmons Group worked with county staff to develop workflows to track new assets at every stage of their development—including application intake, review and pre-construction meetings, site visits, inspections and tests, acceptance, and warranty.

Construction Management Work Orders

The completion of the construction authorization task in the PLL workflow automatically creates construction management work orders in Cityworks AMS containing child inspections—including those for vacuum manhole test, low-pressure air test, and hydrostatic pressure test.

Water bacteria management work orders can also be created and stored in Cityworks AMS to track results and assets tested. Status changes can notify the testing lab when tests are ready, and laboratory results can be stored for future reference.

Each work order contains the date and time of inspection and allows users to attach pictures and notes from the site visit.

GIS Updates

Once a plan is approved, the proposed assets move through a workflow to update the utility’s GIS. This allows the county to start the asset life cycle early.

“What’s great about this is we can trace an asset all the way from that initial pre-construction meeting all the way through the inspection lifecycle,” said Erik Ray, director of technical services at Spotsylvania County. “And then when the as-builts are submitted, we make those modifications in our GIS, which just builds confidence in our asset repository. This never existed before, so now we are catching things that were wrong from the beginning. We have this formal process where things are not getting lost through the cracks.”

Warranty data, condition score, and condition date are all programmatically captured at first acceptance.

“Warranty data was something we had never tracked before,” added Bradley Sacra, manager of utilities development services. “Assets that are currently under warranty are shaded a different color, which, in the case of an emergency, easily informs our field service crews of the warranty status. It’s been great to know immediately that we can recoup some of our expenditures used to fix those assets.  If it’s not an emergency, we can engage with the contractor or the developer to fix those without having to utilize the Utility Department’s resources.”

In addition, the GIS can be updated with final as-built plans or field-noted items such as make, model, or other important aspects of a given asset. This helps ensure data quality and build overall confidence in the GIS data being presented to the end users. 

“The reason we’re putting make and model in there is to help our utilities field services group,” said Steve Gunnett, construction inspector with Spotsylvania County. “If there’s a call that a hydrant was damaged or out of service for some reason, our field services staff are able to look it up and know exactly what parts that they need to take to make repair. That saves them from dispatching someone to figure out what’s going on and then having to come back to the utility shop to get parts.”

Each private development project is identified through the use of polygons in an embedded Cityworks inbox tab. This information is shared with customer service staff so they can consult the map to see if a development has reached first acceptance and is ready for water meter installation and account setup. This process has drastically reduced the amount of emails, phone calls, and conversations about when a development is ready for a given meter to be set, which in turn has reduced the amount of time it takes to set up a customer as a consumer and ratepayer. 

The county also wanted to improve engagement with the development community to increase transparency and ease of use. The Timmons Group PLL Portal is being implemented to expose information to the developers so that they could receive feedback in real time and make requests and schedules digitally.

In addition, the county is actively receiving developer and contractor feedback through its involvement in local building associations.

Real-Time Analysis

Timmons Group also integrated Esri’s Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS to the overall solution. This configurable web app provides location-aware data visualization and analytics to give utilities staff a real-time overview of projects in development. Each inspector can easily view his or her own workload as well as where in the workflow each project stands.

For Spotsylvania County Utilities Department, exploring “What if?” has led to innovative solutions and streamlined processes.

“I always say if you ask the question, Cityworks can be configured to pretty much answer anything, but the question has to be asked first,” said Ray.

As Spotsylvania County continues to grow and develop, demand for new utility services will only increase. By utilizing the workflows in Cityworks PLL to generate work orders and inspections in Cityworks, county staff, with help from Timmons Group, have created an efficient and thoughtful process to ensure that these assets are properly tracked and managed throughout their entire life cycle.

To learn more about going virtual with Timmons Portal and Cityworks PLL, join Timmons for a webinar on April 3 at 1:00 ET. Register today!

By Greg Stephenson, Timmons Group Senior Marketing Coordinator