The Village of Pleasant Prairie, which covers a thirty-six square mile area in the southeast corner of Wisconsin, says that Cityworks has been a good fit for their public works crew of 25 full-time employees who manage over ten thousand assets. Cityworks is user friendly, and its integration with ArcGIS puts a wealth of information in the hands of the crews in the field.
Over the course of a few months, public works supervisors, along with IT personnel, developed a workflow that would cover all of the village’s needs. Public works department foremen use laptops connected to large screen televisions to distribute the work to the crews in the morning meetings. To access Cityworks in the field, the crews use portable tablets that are equipped with cell cards for accessing the internet and built-in cameras for attaching pictures to work orders.
The village assigns work orders to crews instead of individual employees, giving administrators the flexibility to assign work orders to multiple employees, as well as change which employees are on each crew as needed. A mixture of custom observations, service requests, and inspections are used within the work orders to track needed information.
The Inbox user tab feature allows the village to break up the saved searches into multiple groupings. Each department foreman has his own tab with several user panels to divide the saved searches. The saved searches are used to distribute the work orders to the proper personnel. The first panel has searches for unassigned or incomplete work orders, as well as work orders placed on hold. Assigned work orders are located in the second panel and the third panel shows completed work orders waiting to be closed by a supervisor. The foreman assigns a work order to a crew from his unassigned saved search. The employees will then open the search for their assigned crew and complete the work order. Once the crew completes the work, it is routed back to the foreman to review and close. Other departments have their own saved searches, giving them the ability to view completed work orders with the information they need and eliminating the need to create any paper copies.
There is one custom field panel per work order, which is used for work orders with single assets or where only one set of data is needed. For example, the sanitation crews work on a single work order all day and record how much refuse was collected and the invoice number. A meter install only has a single asset per work order, which allows the necessary data to be collected in one observation panel.
Service requests attached to work orders are used to track any requests from residents. This allows the caller information to be tracked and the location to be geocoded based on the address of the request. Service requests can be attached to either an existing work order or a new work order. For example, a call for missed garbage pickup is a service request that can be attached to the closest existing garbage route work order, while a call for a possible water main break will have the service request attached to a newly-created work order. Each type of service request has the proper work order templates assigned to it to ensure the appropriate budget numbers are used for the request.
The ability to attach multiple inspections to a single work order means that multiple assets on one work order can be inspected, a time stamp of when each inspection took place can be included, and the employee is then required to fill out Equipment, Labor, and Material (ELM) just once. For example, for five lift stations with submersible pumps, each of those five inspections are added to a single work order, saving time out in the field. Inspections also provide the ability to create more than one custom panel, so an inspection template and a custom field panel can be created on the same work order.
The village also needed an easy way for crews in the field to create work orders for repairs to vehicles, tools, or attachments. The solution was to create “blanket” work orders for all of our fleet equipment. The searches are separated by light vehicles, heavy vehicles, tools, or attachments; and the work orders automatically regenerate as soon as one is completed. An employee can open a work order for a vehicle, request to have a repair completed, and send it directly to the supervisor.
The workflow that has been created is very similar to the way it was done on paper, which allowed for an easier transition for our supervisors and employees. The work order completion time was cut in half in as little as two weeks after the initial training. Adapting a Cityworks workflow was the key to a successful implementation.
About Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
Located in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, Pleasant Prairie is home to just over 19,000. While it boasts a mix of residential, commercial, manufacturing, and agricultural land use, over 25% of Pleasant Prairie is dedicated to natural conservancy areas like the Chiwaukee Prairie and Des Plaines River Floodplain.
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