Today, Greensboro is utilizing an innovative wireless system to improve efficiency among mobile employees and saving money in the process.
Using the new system, selected city employees -- specifically those whose primary function calls for them to be in the field -- are given laptops that contain a 10Mb card that transmits information to an antenna inside one of several city buildings. At $1,800 per antenna and less than $300 per card, the city has spent less than $100,000 to provide mobile workers with high-speed Internet access.
Building Blocks
The process is simple. Mobile employees only need to be within range of an antenna -- most of them are housed inside city libraries and public safety facilities -- to make use of the system.
So far, Greensboro's building inspectors and code enforcement officials have experienced the most benefits of the system. Before the system was in place, the 32 field inspectors would go to the office downtown at 8 a.m. Once there, they would answer phones to take requests for inspections -- building, electrical, plumbing, erosion, etc. -- for the day and write the inspection requests on a piece of paper. Most days, it was 10 a.m. by the time they left the office for the field. Inspectors would then have to leave the field early at the end of the day to return to the office and submit their inspections so the technicians could post them the next day. Overall, the inspectors were only able to perform inspections for five hours of the eight-hour workday, leaving them to operate -- on a good day -- at 62 percent efficiency.
The first step was to allow people requesting inspections to call in 24 hours a day, allowing the inspectors to get to an inspection site earlier in the day. Another key was to separate the city into seven sections and, using software developed for the department, issue requests for inspections to employees to keep them in the same area during the day rather than criss-crossing the city during one shift.
Using the new system, the inspectors don't have to go to the office to answer phones. In fact, they don't have to go to the office at all. They simply get into a city vehicle in the area where they will be working that day and spend a few minutes downloading the assignments from a remote port. Once an inspection is completed, they then transmit the results back to the main office quickly and easily. Simmons said that inspectors are usually submitting inspection results by about 8:15 a.m. This effort continues until about 4:30 p.m. -- longer than before -- when the inspectors go to a remote port and download the day's information and update the database. There is no paperwork to trade back and forth. And instead of five hours of efficient work, inspectors are now active very close to eight hours a day.
"It would be just like adding eight people to our staff if we were doing business the old way," Simmons said. "For the contractor, he is getting inspections basically all day long, much earlier and much later than before," Simmons added. "He is getting realtime updates. It [also] lessens the load on the technicians, who had to enter 600 inspections by the following day."
In addition, because the inspectors don't have to answer the phones, they can spend more time at each inspection. Instead of skipping breaks and eating lunch on the run to allocate enough time for each inspection, the employees can continue to do a thorough job without the pressure and stress.
"Basically, they're putting their name on the line when they sign and say that this building is OK for occupancy," Simmons said. "They'd like to able to have the time to do a reasonable inspection rather than rushing through it.
"We were faced with increasing workloads in an ever-expanding city limit, nowhere to put any people and not really the budget to hire the amount of people it would take to do what we needed to do," he added. "We had to turn somewhere, and we turned to technology."
Mirror, Mirror ...
When the city turned to technology for this function, it was entering into mostly unchartered territory.
Johnson said Greensboro prototyped several technologies, but didn't have a government jurisdiction to look to as a leader.
"The problem that we had in putting this together was that we had nobody to copy," Simmons said. "Nobody had ever gone as far as we had in putting together so many pieces. Some people had laptops they used in the field and came back to the office to download the information. Nobody was doing a wireless piece. Certainly nobody was doing high-speed wireless LANs. We just had to explore on our own until we could find what could work and work together."
Johnson said other counties have expressed interest in the Greensboro system. Los Angeles County, the nation's largest, made an attempt at a similar system and was slated to visit Greensboro in January to find out exactly how the system works.
Johnson said the reason this has worked in 215,000-resident Greensboro instead of a larger jurisdiction is because of the emphasis city officials put on giving employees high-speed access at a low cost. "We have a network infrastructure that, I can say, is probably better than any city in the United States," Johnson said. "For a city our size, probably 80 percent of our buildings of any consequence have fiber. That's phenomenal, and that allows us to do some things that other people can't do."
Bryan M. Gold is a writer based in Washington, D.C. E-mail:
