Cobb County, Ga., Implements Vehicle and Work Order Tracking

Cobb County, Ga.'s, Water System has deployed Intergraph's mobile resource management solutions to automate the sorting and routing of work orders and to track, manage and assign jobs to field crews performing routine maintenance and troubleshooting on the department's network of water and wastewater assets. The deployment comes following successful completion of a pilot project, which implemented a prototype system using Intergraph's IntelliWhere TrackForce technology, a server-based, highly scalable platform that allows the county to track and manage the location of field crews and mobile assets in real time.

In just one week, Cobb County deployed a pilot automated vehicle location system, which was integrated with the county's existing parcel, landbase and street data stored in an ArcSDE GIS; the Water System's existing facility data stored in Intergraph's GeoMedia; and work order data stored in the Banner Customer Information System from Indus. With the new system, the county has saved about 30 to 40 minutes per field crew per day.

"Intergraph solutions give us a reliable method to improve our existing processes, eliminating manual job sorting and improving paper ticket procedures," said John Knowles, Engineering and Records Division, Cobb County Water System. "We look forward to the additional benefits available by extending the technology to include other work types, such as the maintenance orders from our Hansen system."

The new system allows supervisors to more effectively monitor fieldwork and efficiently assign jobs to the right crew at the right location. Among the work order routing and location-based job optimization functionality available, the system provides the department with mobile resource management capabilities which provide historical audit trails of the route traveled by a vehicle in case questions arise that require proof of location at a given time; allow geospatial alarms to be set to go off when unauthorized crews enter restricted zones outside their assigned area; set time-based job alarms for crews increased safety if a vehicle has not moved after a specified period of time; and track the progress of mobile resources against daily plans and flag jobs that are at risk of not being completed on time or jobs that have resources that are falling behind

In the future, the Water System plans to expand the system to include additional work types and add mobile capabilities to its existing applications so that job information can be wirelessly received and sent.