It’s our collective responsibility to ensure worker safety and protect customer well-being while delivering essential services during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Cityworks, with ArcGIS and partner tools and solutions, can help your organization reprioritize field work, manage emergency response, shift to remote work environments, and respond to customer requests.
At Cityworks, we understand how important it is for you to ensure worker safety during this pandemic. Your customers rely on continued service and accurate information, and your field crews work on the front lines of community resilience. Yet social distancing policies and work-from-home strategies are uncharted territory for many organizations. Together, Cityworks and ArcGIS offer a comprehensive solution that can help your organization respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency events quickly and effectively.
A GIS-CENTRIC SOLUTION
Cityworks is a GIS-centric application built on the Esri ArcGIS platform, and our COVID-19 solution uses technology that’s included in both Esri’s Coronavirus Response Solution and Esri’s Coronavirus Business Continuity Solution. Different components of Cityworks functionality can be used to expand that tool set. For example, Cityworks Storeroom enables the tracking and issuance of personal protective equipment (PPE). The Cityworks Public Access Portal allows organizations to maintain their business operations while also practicing social distancing. Cityworks Respond and the mobile native apps support field operations. The Cityworks COVID-19 solution is cloud-hosted in Cityworks Online—a secure system with all the functionality of our on-premises solution. Cityworks Online can be deployed rapidly, and all updates and maintenance are performed by Cityworks experts. This alleviates the burden of technology maintenance for your organization, allowing you to focus on the critical tasks at hand.
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Here is an overview of the Cityworks COVID-19 solution and how it can be utilized in a typical workflow. Keep in mind that it isn’t a requirement to implement everything shown. We understand that each organization’s needs are unique, so consider this a menu offering with several options to choose from.
MANAGING TEST SITES, PERMITS, AND INSPECTIONS
Paired with the Esri solution, Cityworks can help manage COVID-19 data, facility closures, and test site management. Cityworks can help manage closures of schools and other public places, collected in the Esri solution, as PLL cases or work orders. The Esri solution also offers functionality geared toward managing and locating testing sites, which can be linked to Cityworks work activities to regulate construction and management of those testing sites.
The Testing Sites Locator within the Esri solution allows citizens to locate COVID-19 testing facilities. A citizen accesses the application, enters an address, and by adjusting the radius can find any testing facilities in the area.
These facilities are designated within the Testing Sites Manager. After a location is deemed acceptable for a testing site, a testing site can be created. Depending on the municipality or state regulations, the facility may have to meet certain construction and health permit reviews, which are initiated in the Cityworks Public Access portal and managed by a Cityworks PLL case. This allows the process to be carried out digitally and enables social distancing protocols.
To ensure that the testing site meets any necessary regulations, the case workflow in our solution contains a thorough review process. There are reviews at both the health department and state department levels to make sure both organizations approve the proposed plan. From there, a construction permit can be issued. The workflow includes a construction review to ensure that the built environment matches what was approved within the plan. After the construction review, a temporary health permit can be issued—a critical step in the workflow.
First, this is where requirements on conditions are enforced. The health permit cannot be issued if there isn’t proper medical equipment on site, adequate law enforcement present, and testing tents the proper distance apart. If those conditions are not completed, the workflow is designed to prevent health permit issuance.
The Cityworks Public Access portal is another example of how Cityworks extends the Esri solution. Using Public Access, citizens can complete permitting, licensing, and inspection tasks online and without any physical contact.
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The Cityworks COVID-19 solution includes applications for emergency delivery driver registration, allowing furloughed or retired drivers to deliver emergency goods. The templates include an emergency health care professional registration, as well as a community development block grant application to apply for funds to combat the health crisis. The Public Access website is easily configured and empowers the public to remain involved without increasing the odds of spreading the disease.
ASSESSING HEALTH RISK
With new testing sites come some potential problems. For example, how do you ensure social distancing practices are being followed? Can patients be pre-screened online to ensure that your limited resources are dedicated to those who are most at risk? Cityworks Public Access can help solve these problems.
The workflow begins when a potential patient logs into the COVID-19 risk assessment Public Access site. They create a case and fill out the necessary information, including their current symptoms. There are also options to share other pertinent information such as age, health history, and whether or not the person has been exposed to someone who has tested positive for the virus. Within the Cityworks dashboard, health professionals can open the case and view the information entered by the patient.
After reviewing the data, they make their assessment in the workflow. If a particular patient has been assessed as high risk for having contracted COVID-19, then the health professional selects “high risk” as the assessment in the workflow, and it automatically updates with a new task. A notification is sent to the patient informing them that they are high risk and requesting that they schedule a test via the COVID-19 Public Access site.
In Public Access, the patient can now use the scheduling tool. This helps prevent people from coming to the testing site without an appointment or having to wait long periods of time, thereby reducing unnecessary exposure to others.
TRACKING OPERATIONS FOR FEMA REIMBURSEMENT
One main purpose of the Cityworks COVID-19 response is tracking and facilitating operations as they relate to federal funding opportunities. With Project Manager, Cityworks users can track emergency-related work such as managing testing and distribution sites, donations, and PPE or other material inventories.
The COVID-19 project is preconfigured in the cloud solution and is set as the default project for all Cityworks AMS solution templates such as service requests, work orders, and inspections, with any associated costs rolling up to the overall project budget. This makes it easy to review project activities, attach related documents, and visualize the data.
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The COVID-19 project dashboards in Respond or the Office inbox are intended to provide a complete view of the pandemic response, including the testing and distribution sites, related inspections, and even managing donations and volunteers.
Cityworks Project Manager also makes it easy to complete FEMA forms such as the ICS Form 214 activity log by translating project data through Crystal Reports. Our solution templates and project are intended to capture the what, where, when, and how much of your response efforts, which will be required for federal funding requests.
MANAGING TESTING SITES
Whether the community is responsible for managing COVID-19 testing sites or just wants to enable reporting, AMS templates can capture the data in both Cityworks Office and Respond. We recommend using Respond because it works well on both a tablet and computer and it’s easy to customize the end user experience using Style.
Once the testing site asset is created in Esri’s solution, the layer can be used as a service in Cityworks and the asset can be attached to work orders and inspections. The testing site creation work order has multiple child inspections being generated. The child inspections track the number of tests performed each day, number of test kits onsite, and more. Additionally, fields from the initial testing site in Esri’s solution carry over to custom fields in Cityworks.
The user can then access the related inspection, which will already have the asset associated with the activity. The observations section can be updated as the user prefers.
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The inspection includes Site Observations and Testing Report panels that are each composed of critical fields to inform future planning. For example, the inspector can enter what the expected attendance to the testing site may be and later capture the actual turnout, which can then be reviewed in Cityworks Analytics to help adapt operations to meet actual needs. Another detail to capture may be which other organizations are participating at the testing site, such as nonprofits, hospitals, counties, and states. The daily maximum allotment of testing kits followed by the number of used kits can also be documented.
MANAGING DISTRIBUTION SITES
Many communities are setting up and managing distribution sites for hand sanitizer, meals, and other necessities. We took a similar approach to the Testing Site work order, where the work order serves as the parent to the related daily inspections.
The work order and related inspection edit pages are configured to minimize visible fields and expanded panels while providing necessary information. Users can configure observations such as daily attendance, collaborating entities, and opening and closing counts for items like meals or sanitizing products (although this can also be managed in Storeroom as material). All of this data will be useful to track patterns, site needs, and modify operations if necessary.
MANAGING DONATIONS AND VOLUNTEERS
Donations and volunteer hours qualify for reimbursement under FEMA Public Assistance programs—so long as they are documented correctly. One way to facilitate the process is to use the Donation Intake service request to capture donor information, what is intended, and how the request was received. In order to track volunteers, create a “Donation Volunteer” employee with no login information and configure the labor rate to be the national average, which is currently $25.43. Then, as labor hours are entered for each volunteer, the cost will tally.
Meanwhile, the Donation Acceptance inspection can be used to further document the donor’s sector; what is being donated; estimated quantities, value, and availability; and even use the electronic signature functionality to have the donor sign off on the donation.
DOCUMENTING RESPONSE EFFORTS
We included four additional templates in our solution to help document the work being done in the emergency operations center (EOC) and other operations associated with the pandemic. These templates are:
• EOC/Incident—General Planning
• Facilities Cleaning
• Incident Response—General
• Location Closure/Opening— Prep
Each work order is intended to provide a simple approach to document other work being done. The closure/opening work order was based on feedback from Cityworks users who are closing parks or other facilities and must post signs or set barricades to prevent entry or use.
VISUALIZING AND ANALYZING DATA
Using ArcGIS Insights, Cityworks Analytics provides an out-of-thebox workbook with maps, charts, and tables to help users visualize and analyze COVID-19 response data within Cityworks. For example, users can view total tests, total confirmations, recoveries, and locations—all indispensable data to identify community hotspots and make operational adjustments. The COVID-19 workbook has individual tabs for each of the solution areas such as the PLL cases, testing andcdistribution sites, inventory management,cand donations.
Users can also analyze tasks in review and the results of those tasks. They can be displayed by day or by month as well as by who is completing each task. Maps will also show where inspections are taking place. As users select from either a map or a chart, they can quickly and easily view distribution sites, testing sites, and donation sites. They can also get a count of which type of inspections are being done and pull the inspection results into various types of charts.
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Tracking costs, equipment, labor, materials, and donations is an important aspect of any COVID-19 response. That’s why within Cityworks Analytics we provide a page that allows users to monitor their Cityworks Storeroom inventory data. In Storeroom, users can track the cost, type, and quantity of items received or issued.
As noted with the testing and distribution site templates, the data displays where those are occurring, evaluate the expected and actual attendance, activity breakdown, and observation results. Additionally, the placement of the sites can be evaluated using the drive time views such as estimating proximity. The work orders and inspections can also be interpreted by workload distribution, ELM costs, and custom field data, all of which provide greater detail into operational awareness.
Managing donations is further enhanced by displaying the location of donors, quantities, and donation types. Both the donation intake requests and acceptance inspections can be evaluated including the data captured in the observations. But the most valuable information is the donation tallies both for quantity and estimated value.
The power behind Cityworks Analytics is not only the data itself but also the ability to share it with the rest of your organization, and there is no better way than serving it up in Cityworks. The workbook can be added to the Cityworks Inbox and shared with users.
Cityworks is dedicated to helping communities respond to, recover from, and prepare for emergency events. Whether or not you are a current customer, we will assist you in implementing the Cityworks COVID-19 solutions quickly and seamlessly.
For more information, including solutions from our business partners, visit cityworks.com/covid-19 or email info@cityworks.com.
By Becky Tamashasky, Cityworks Vice President of Vision and Product Engineering, and Cara Haslam, Brad Johnson, Dan Puerling, and Dinorah Sanchez, Cityworks Subject Matter Experts
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