Cartegraph, a leader in high-performance government software and services, is pleased to announce the winners of its 2017-2018 High-Performance Government Awards. The prestigious honor recognizes local government organizations leveraging modern operations management technology to solve problems, work smarter, and improve their communities.
“Our goal is to help organizations achieve measurable results on their journey to becoming a high-performance government,” said Nick Kittle, Cartegraph government performance and innovation coach and an award judge. “This list represents some of the very best work being done in our country today and we are so proud to work with these communities.”
The following organizations rose to the top of the competition based on their accomplishments using Cartegraph software in several core areas, including infrastructure management and improvement, operational efficiency, citizen engagement, and data-driven decision-making.
City of Arlington, Texas
With over 90 parks under its belt, estimating maintenance costs was a cumbersome and expensive process for the City of Arlington. Manually inspecting the park system took more than 4,500 labor hours to complete, and the paper-to-database approach was redundant and expensive. Putting Cartegraph’s mobile inspection capabilities and built-in overall condition indexes to work, the Arlington team is now assessing and analyzing their infrastructure in real time, saving 4,100 hours or $62,000 in labor costs annually.
City of Auburn, Washington
The City of Auburn dared to overcome a common dilemma: how do you pinpoint the location of an asset you can’t see? To prevent the expensive repairs and major project delays that come with unintentionally digging up critical assets, the City combined Cartegraph technology, ArcGIS, and 3D mixed reality to arm crews with “x-ray vision.” Now, whether they’re in the field or in the office, staff can see and interact with underground assets without ever lifting a shovel. This futuristic tech has even opened the door to more dynamic council presentations and easier remote or confined-space inspections.
Town of Bluffton, South Carolina
Implementing software is a challenge for any organization, but “going live” during a disaster certainly ups the ante. Hours before Hurricane Irma fell upon the Town of Bluffton, crews hit the ground running with Cartegraph: inventorying equipment, programming FEMA rates, and learning to create tasks, enter labor hours, and more from mobile devices. Rallied together, crews logged 200 hours of cleanup work and real-time FEMA reimbursement reporting helped save 3 days—or $5,000—in post-storm data entry labor costs.
Village of Buffalo Grove, Illinois
With over 13,000 annual vehicle inspections, the Village of Buffalo Grove Public Works team sought to streamline their paper-based fleet reporting and repair workflows. Combining Cartegraph mobile inspections and automated workflows, crews are now reporting on daily vehicle conditions and generating fleet repair tasks in real time. What seems like a simple solution has Buffalo Grove reaping hefty rewards, saving the Village 13,145 sheets of paper or nearly 2 trees, 35 days, and about $20,000 labor hours every year.
City of Kingsport, Tennessee
To facilitate water compliance, documentation is key. But, when crews are fixing an emergency main break in freezing temperatures, it’s easy to forget to record a step. After building automated maintenance workflows in Cartegraph, the Kingsport team is confident they’ll never miss a beat. During de-watered repairs, crews are now required to fill in chlorine and bacteriological sample fields before moving on, and follow-up flushing tasks are automatically created based off the readings. To date, Kingsport has saved 32 hours in documentation review and follow up, and can prove—without a doubt—they’re delivering safe, clean water to their citizens.
City of New Braunfels, Texas
As the second fastest growing city in the nation, New Braunfels is challenged with providing citizens the best service possible—especially when it comes to their pavement management program. By leveraging real-time street maintenance data, the team is confidently allocating limited resources and has even justified a 50 percent budget increase. Through streamlined reporting, the City is saving hours on spreadsheet entry, responding to citizen requests twice as fast, and increasing transparency with citizens and other departments.
City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
When an infrastructure network is built for twice your current population, you need to make educated decisions on how time and taxpayer dollars are spent. That’s why the City of Pittsburgh is using their work and asset data to build equitable street paving budgets based on practical—not political—infrastructure improvements. Staff have become more compelling, data-driven storytellers, resulting in a $1 million paving budget increase, more informed city planners, safer streets, and improved transparency and citizen engagement.