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Improving Our Services

SmarterWX Automate

Background

Council is currently subscribed to the Dial Before You Dig (DBYD) service and receives up to 140 enquiries each week for information regarding locations of underground infrastructure. This information is provided to ensure the safety and awareness of council owned buried assets for anyone working within the vicinity of these assets. Council owns and maintains over 300 kilometres of undergrounds assets (approx. $200 million worth of underground assets) such as Fibre Optic Cables, Stormwater and Recycled Water infrastructure. The workload to provide DBYD responses manually has accumulated over the past few years to a point where it is no longer sustainable to undertake manual responses.

The Project

SmarterWX Automate system offered a solution to automatically respond to enquirers by providing a map of any underground assets owned by The City of Marion within the proposed dig site. Multiple teams across the City of Marion came together to develop the map templates and develop rules and guidelines for safe excavation around the City of Marion underground assets. The automated system went live early February 2020.

The Project Outcomes

The Automation process has

  • Saved approx. 12 hours of staff time each week as SmarterWX Automate removes the need to manually respond to enquiries
  • Understand who is undertaking works and where the proposed dig site are across the City of Marion using the SmarterWX Automate mapping platform
  • Developed high level reporting to show what type of activities and how activate each suburbs are within the City of Marion

Work Team Route Optimisation

Background

The route optimisation tool has the ability to take a team’s job sites across the City and create the most efficient route to travel. These routes can be created daily and distributed to the teams through the OptimoRoute application on a smart device.

Objectives

  • Reduce planning efforts and increasing efficiency by minimising travel time.
  • Real-time tracking showing where drivers are at any time, what’s being done, who’s on or behind in time and which jobs to reassign.
  • Prioritisation of job assignment for higher priority tasks to be added to the daily work list and new routes planned within seconds.

Technology Trial

  • A route optimisation application called OptimoRoute is currently being trialed within the Engineering and Field Service teams.
  • Current use is being trialed with the tree watering truck program to allow the existing water trucks to manage the increase in tree planting.
  • and the hard rubbish collection teams.

This innovation is scalable across other departments eg Community Safety Team and Facilities Maintenance.

Capital Works Projects Collaboration

Background

Across, the city there are a number of agencies and utilities, as well as Council that plan and deliver capital works and infrastructure projects. Often, due to lack of visibility and collaboration, efforts can be duplicated and works repeated unnecessarily. Due to the scale of these projects, this duplication can result in significant additional costs being incurred not to mention the increased inconvenience to the community.

Objectives

The Smarterwx platform is an online collaboration tool for council, utilities, telecommunications providers and transport authorities to share project information well in advance of the works being undertaken. Opportunities for projects to be coordinated based on time and location are then identified and the relevant project managers alerted. The project managers can then work together to determine the appropriate way forward for the projects for the benefit of the organisations involved, the impacted residents and the broader community.

The council projects included are:

  • Capital works projects for the current financial year
  • Proposed capital works projects for the next 3 financial years
  • Subdivision works

As well as sharing project information, the solution allows the council to identify areas and time periods where works cannot be carried out. The platform also enables higher internal visibility of projects across departments in council.

Benefits

The implementation of this solution has:

  1. Reduces disruption to the community during the programmed works
  2. Reduces duplication in costs, where similar/related works can be delivered simultaneously or in an order to reduce disruption
  3. Provides greater visibility of both internal and external projects
  4. Simplify's communication and collaboration between council and external agencies