York County Government, South Carolina, has leveraged Cityworks in some unusual ways on top of the traditional work management usages. Using Cityworks to meet a variety of needs across multiple divisions, the County has experienced enhanced management of assets and use of GIS. This has resulted in more efficient business processes and better decision making.
Cityworks is championed at York County by the GIS Division and has been implemented throughout many areas, including engineering/ transportation, road maintenance, solid waste disposal, engineering utilities, solid waste collection and recycling, facilities maintenance, and building maintenance. Cityworks is also used for emergency management efforts, to adhere to environmental compliance standards, and to track radiological equipment (such as dosimeters, survey meters, and so on). Cityworks Storeroom is used to distribute evacuation calendars and to track equipment used in meth lab response efforts.
With Cityworks, York County has improved its ability to capture and retrieve structured data from custom fields using SQL Reporting Services. Cityworks service requests, work orders, and inspections are used to store information instead of Microsoft documents such as Excel. This enables the County to more easily and efficiently fetch details that enhance decision making.
With out of the box—with minimal XML configurations— to improve usability, along with some simple T-SQL behind the scenes to enhance asset tracking in the geodatabase. Groups such as emergency management, solid waste collection and recycling, and road maintenance are looking beyond the traditional uses of Server AMS to improve how they manage assets such as dosimeters, improve data captured for use in grant writing, and to make better decisions about allocating resources.
Originally, Cityworks was implemented in 2012 for road maintenance to replace a failing homegrown system. Since then, its use has expanded into 10 very different departments or divisions. When implementing across many areas, county staff noticed a reoccurring theme: the importance of the continued need for structured capture of institutional knowledge. Many key staff realized they were holders of institutional knowledge and were critical to the continuity of operations. They knew that they could improve their work environment by ensuring that their knowledge was placed in Cityworks. Cityworks became a powerful tool when selling staff on its ability to input valuable data and generate both metrics for decision making and observations about performance.
The County’s solid waste collection and recycling staff attends numerous events each year where they provide educational outreach opportunities. Since using Cityworks, they have migrated from storing event information in Office documents to Cityworks, and can obtain data for grants easier and more accurately at the end of each year. With more than 70 custom fields and ELM (equipment, labor, and materials) and with dozens of giveaway items tracked in Storeroom, they are now able to have a more accurate handle on inventory and the actual costs associated with these events. They are also better able to justify budget requests and grant applications.
After county staff learned how to configure Cityworks and applied it in a few very different ways, they began to notice it met some needs that would normally have taken weeks for their programmer to complete. By leveraging one software package, county staff reuses new skills and has become more effective at ensuring users are utilizing Cityworks in a productive way— sometimes allowing information to be shared between departments or staff and citizens for the first time.
Cityworks has allowed the county’s GIS program to move beyond “just making maps.” The division is able to have ongoing and engaging conversations with coworkers across the organization about how they can best serve county citizens. The GIS Division feels they can now offer better tools to other areas within the County to store information and be more efficient. Cityworks has enabled that conversation to take place and allowed the GIS Division to become a champion of that conversation.
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