The City of Arnold, Missouri (Arnold), recently completed their testing phase of the Cityworks Online Solution (CWOL) with remarkable results. Enthusiastic about their experience with CWOL, Arnold expressed great satisfaction with the functionality of CWOL, as well as anticipated cost benefits of utilizing the cloud-hosted deployment option.
As an organization on the lookout for ways to provide and manage critical services more cost effectively, Arnold jumped at the opportunity to add CWOL to their repertoire of best practices. Designed to leverage ArcGIS Online, CWOL is the latest GIS-centric option for deploying Cityworks. CWOL is cloud-hosted, cost-effective, easy to use, and quickly configured and deployed using the Cityworks jumpstart package.
Deion Christopher, Information Technology Manager, said, “During our testing phase of Cityworks Online, our staff saved up their work orders and service requests in order to push the limits of the system with mass entries. Since then, and as of today, I have not received a single complaint. Everyone is happy with the user interface, and Internet connection hasn’t caused any latency issues. There is nothing but praises coming from our user group.”
For the city, the decision to try CWOL was driven by the overall estimated cost savings and benefits it could provide.
“It seemed drastic at the time, but based on our analysis, I made the decision to move from our in-house system to a completely cloud-hosted application service provider environment,” said Christopher. “Although the costs were somewhat higher with a hosted system, the overall ROI far outweighed those costs.”
Prior to officially deploying CWOL, Arnold participated in an intensive testing phase designed to stretch the program’s capacity and limits.
“We asked our testers to push the Cityworks Online system hard and to try every feature offered,” explained Christopher. “From work orders to service request call entries, the feedback I received was positive. In fact, our testers continued accessing Cityworks Online after the official test phase stop date was reached and requested an extension because they wanted to further test features that either were not tried due to the time constraints, or to try out features not thought of earlier. Overall, I would say that the Cityworks Online testing phase was a great success.”
With a thorough and successful testing phase behind them, Arnold is moving forward with CWOL and experiencing the benefits and results this method of deployment offers.
“I am pleased with how the Cityworks Online solution meets our current IT needs,” concluded Christopher. “Staff is thrilled to be moving one step closer to severing those tethers to their offices. The City of Arnold looks forward to working with Azteca Systems as we move forward with Cityworks Online as our final cloud-hosted GIS solution.”
“The Cityworks Online Solution is a very exciting addition to our line of products,” stated Brian Haslam, President and CEO of Azteca Systems – Cityworks. “As a cloud-hosted GIS-centric solution, Cityworks Online provides a cost effective, quick-to-configure and deploy, and easy to use solution that is at the core the same Cityworks software which is used by over 500 organizations. We are very pleased with Arnold’s positive experience using Cityworks Online, and are pleased that Cityworks will be used day-to-day to help Arnold provide and manage critical services.”